A. Ian Wong

Merry Christmas everyone! 

I can’t seem to sleep tonight, so I’m off editing things. Apparently, you can create a Google Scholar citation page that auto-tracks your citations and your impact (or lack thereof). Mine’s here!

The Magento SOAP API is, quite possibly, one of the worst APIs that I’ve had the opportunity (or need) to work with. 

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/webservices-api/introduction

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/webservices-api/api

The two links above are the sum total of the documented API. Nothing accompanies it, and the definitions aren’t always consistent. To boot, they don’t really have much in the way of its’ instruction.

I’m working in C#, and I’ve hit several errors that, given the black box nature of this WSDL API, mean that I have no clue how to even start debugging it. I’ve listed my problem here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/267867/

We’ll see if anyone responds to it, but I’m not overly optimistic…

If I ever get enough resources to start improving and possibly starting a nightly fork/repo of Magento, the first thing I’ll need to fix is the API. 

I’m trying to understand the process of proposing.

What to do: I need to know what’s state-of-the-art, so I could therefore understand the kind of invention I can do.

How to do it: Read dissertations and papers. This…is going to be painful. Understand how and why they did their dissertation and research.

Next, summarize them under their categories, and start mapping out the space. Until you know what techniques you can use, you’re throwing darts in the dark.

I plan to have a topic and flesh it out by December 15th, 2011. Let’s see if I can maintain this! There’s a lot to write out, but it’s all planning.

Hey guys,

I’ll be trying to keep this up to date from now on. It’s gonna be tricky, but this should be fun!

Cheers,

Ian