Programmatic API

[katsanva]

Hi @nmaro. What about to have programmatic API for ooth alongside HTTP?

That will allow creating ooth-based services that can communicate not only by HTTP, but any transporter (e.g WebSocket, RabbitMQ, NATS, etc) and with the power of any framework (e.g. seneca, moleculer, sails, koa, etc.).

In this way, current HTTP API, which is now hard tied to express, may become an express router which uses programmatic API internally.

As far of now I can't find any way to integrate ooth with some existing code base than make fetch/request to ooth's HTTP endpoint, and that looks like a pretty strange (and expensive in latency) solution.

[aaronmgdr]

I like this

[nickredmark]

Good idea.

[nickredmark]

Hey @katsanva since I believe this will generate a major release I think we need to discuss the details a bit more.

Ooth is coupled to express, because it is coupled to passport.js which injects the user in the request and session. I think I need a better idea of where you want to make the decoupling cut. Could give some examples of

• methods that you would like to call on such a programmatic API (and what they would do).
• What you would give to the ooth constructor instead of an express app.

A note: the express app provided to ooth is used to

• register a few global middlewares (cookieParser, bodyParser, passport and expressWs)
• register express.Router to which all routes are registered (methods called are all, get, ws, post).

[katsanva]

Hey, @nmaro

Its all about to decouple oooh from express and HTTP protocol only.

The idea is to make same API to HTTP one, like POST /local/register -> ooth.local.register() and so on. Going this way to create an instance you need only to define what strategies should ooth use and what backend for users to use.

It may be the best way to re-use passport strategies without actual passport.js usage.

The express usage may persist in some ooth-express package, which will only call ooth.local.register() and so on under the hood.

[nickredmark]

Now every method registered with

ooth.registerMethod can be called with ooth.callMethod

For example with ooth-local it is now possible to run

ooth.on('register', ({_id, email, verificationToken}) => ...))

await ooth.callMethod('local', 'register', { email, password })

If this doesn't satisfy all your use cases just let me know, I'll close this for now.