lakesuperior_legacy/doc/notes/architecture.md

LAKEsuperior Architecture

LAKEsuperior is written in Python. It is not excluded that parts of the code may be rewritten in Cython for performance.

Multi-Modal Access

LAKEsuperior services and data are accessible in multiple ways:

• Via HTTP. This is the canonical way to interact with LDP resources and conforms quite closely to the Fedora specs (currently v4).
• Via command line. This method includes long-running admin tasks which are not available via HTTP.
• Via a Python API. This method allows to use Python scripts to access the same methods available to the two methods above in a programmatic way. It is possible to write Python plugins or even to embed LAKEsuperior in a Python application, even without running a web server.

Architecture Overview

The LAKEsuperior REST API provides access to the underlying Python API. All REST and CLI operations can be replicated by a Python program accessing this API.

The main advantage of the Python API is that it makes it very easy to maipulate graph and binary data without the need to serialize or deserialize native data structures. This matters when handling large ETL jobs for example.

The Python API is divided in three main areas:

• Resource API. This API is in charge of all the resource CRUD operations and implements the majority of the Fedora specs.
• Admin API. This exposes utility methods, mostly long-running maintenance jobs.
• Query API. This provides several facilities for querying repository data.