Move to REST-based API relay protocol?

[digitalrane]

Hello! Thank you for all of your work on weechat-android over the years, I have been using it for a long time, it's really great.
I also understand this might have been asked before but I thought it would be good to have an issue for it, is there a plan to use the "API" (or HTTP RESTful) relay protocol at some point?

it's my understanding this is the new direction for relay clients and might also be easier to work with and maintain in the future as working with the binary packed relay protocol (from personal experience) can by pretty difficult to debug.

Anyhow, if the preference is to stick with the binary packed protocol for Weechat android please feel free to close this issue, otherwise it'd be interesting to understand if you think this would be a big piece of work or if there would be any benefits/downsides of using the newer protocol approach. Thanks again!

[mhoran]

It's not something that we're actively working on at the moment, but we'll look into it someday. It will greatly simplify our code and brings some features such as stable IDs that will make synchronization much easier. (Some stable IDs have been added to the relay, but but not all.)

We'll need to determine what to do about all the connection modes supported by weechat-android today. The API only natively supports WebSockets. We could still support SSH by setting up a tunnel like we do today. TCP and TLS will go away. I think that's probably fine -- I personally use WebSockets and have found them to be quite stable.

I expect the relay protocol to go away someday, so we'll have to do this work. There are benefits, it's just a matter of prioritization.