For this installment of This Old Blog, we’ll be looking at the only kind of Modeling that anyone will ever ask me to do: Object Modeling with UML.
I have a couple of gripes with the current crop of blogging apps. Movable Type makes blogging easy, but could it be easier? I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity…
Why not use an API that already exists and is implemented in many packages? There's the Blogger API, the Metaweblog API (and the Mt extensions to that), and hte Atom API. Of those, the Atom API seems the smartest to start off with since it's the one that's most likely to be supported cross-platform and long term. That is, as long as your blogging software supports it right now.
The advantage to doing this is that you can make a front-end that works with alredy existing blogging packages. No need to reinvent all the storage, authentication, and other stuff.
I totally agree that, externally, I'd like to support Atom or another API (I did some reading, and Atom seems to be the most mature protocol). But, if I internally design the system around these API's, I'd essentially be boudn to them. To me, it makes more sense to use my own object graph internally, then provide seperate controllers to handle Atom/Metaweblog/Blogger requests. Those controllers would just be thin veneers that translate from the foreign API to the native one.