Call to Arms: Let's work on REST!

Calling all devs!

As the ecosystem around OpenMRS gets more mature, there are more and more examples of people trying to build downstream systems that interact with OpenMRS via REST, and greater use of REST from within the OpenMRS reference application.

But our REST web services need a lot of work. Just from my own experience see this and this. And lots of bugs are getting reported without ever being worked on.

REST is really strategic for us, and we should be putting more attention into it!

So, I’d like to ask everyone:

  • if you’re a newer OpenMRS developer, trying to decide what ticket to pick up, choose a REST one!
  • if you’re an experienced OpenMRS dev and you hear someone asking what ticket they should pick up, tell them to pick a REST one!
  • if you’re an experienced OpenMRS dev, and you have a spare moment, do a REST ticket!

…I hope you see where I’m going with this. :smile:

I have taken the liberty of marking a handful of REST tickets with the label “community-priority”. (I have plans for using that label to try to direct and measure community activity, that I’ll talk about later, but for now let’s just say that it’s a handful of tickets that are worth doing, but obviously not all the tickets worth doing, or necessarily the top tickets or anything.)

So, if you’re looking to pick up a REST ticket, I suggest you get it here: https://issues.openmrs.org/issues/?jql=labels%20%3D%20community-priority%20and%20project%20%3D%20"Webservices%20REST%20Module"

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