Documentation on the interface used by the office plugins for accessing zotero firefox plugin

nagchampa

I'm trying to find the documentation on the interface used between the firefox plugin and the office plugins. I'm doing a report on Web 2.0 applications, and I'm looking at the APIs used by different applications.

Looking through the source code of the OO.o plugin, it looks like it's possibly using SOAP requests to a tcp port opened by the firefox plugin. Is this correct?

dstillman

Yes, it's using SOAP. There's no documentation for this, but you can run Zotero with debug output enabled to see the full communication between Zotero and the plugin. But the plugin interface isn't really designed to be a public API in the same way that, say, the website API—which is currently in use behind-the-scenes and which will be published soon—will be.

nagchampa

Yeah, I was using Zotero as a counter example to other services with publically exposed APIs, noting that because of its different role, the fact that the central part of the service runs from your browser, not the web, the API doesn't have the same relationship to the service as it does in the other services, although it is in my opinion still a Web 2.0 application (Web 2.0 having been heavily based on O'Reilly's article, where he talks about the API in terms of serialisation and "remixability")

I'm curious though, what are the chances of a web based API to the collection stored in my profile as part of the synchronisation feature?

noksagt

I'm curious though, what are the chances of a web based API to the collection stored in my profile as part of the synchronisation feature?

Yes. Some nitty-gritty at: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6966/
and in multiple other posts here & in the dev google group.

dstillman

I'm curious though, what are the chances of a web based API to the collection stored in my profile as part of the synchronisation feature?

This is what I'm referring to above. It will offer pretty much everything you would expect in a web service API. The Zotero website itself, though it has extended privileges, is essentially just a client of the API, which should give you some idea of what will be possible. Documentation will be published soon.

(There's also a JS API in the client itself, of course, open to any other Firefox extension. Comments are gradually being converted to JSDoc format, which will allow for automatic documentation generation.)

nagchampa

One example of a good use for this would be to write a "plugin" for google docs to use my Zotero library. Google does have a habit of making their applications hackable after all. And if they didn't, there's always greasemonkey ;-)