JS/Python API for scripting

[brollb]

We have discussed an API to promote scripting with DeepForge. This issue is meant to track design discussion, etc, around this API.

So far, I have been thinking using gRPC as this would allow the API to be largely generated from a protobuf file. However, one shortcoming would be that gRPC is not available in the browser without a gateway proxy (grpc-web).

Tasks that would be useful to be able to script:

• Importing/uploading artifacts
• Executing pipelines
• Downloading artifacts
• Creating pipelines?
• Creating operations?
• Creating utilities?

[umesh-timalsina]

Yeah this looks like a great feature to have. But does grpc-web proxy has to reside in client machine or its something that needs to handled from the server side?

[brollb]

They use envoy (similar to nginx) which runs on the server side: https://www.envoyproxy.io/

[brollb]

Another useful feature would be mounting projects on the filesystem so they can be edited as text. On linux, this could be achieved by creating a custom FUSE adapter though this wouldn't address all the challenges. For example, in order to add a reference to an operation, the operation interface editor is currently required. This could be changed by adding support for type annotations to differentiate btwn different types of references or attributes.