[OpenWrt-Devel] Data_Model_Structure_Proposal_for_OpenWRT

[Sukru Senli]

Dear OpenWrt community,

As we know OpenWrt is gaining popularity among industry players, especially in residential gateway world. Being one of these industry player who has been developing OpenWrt based software for over five years now and being a devoted user of the two core components, UBUS and UCI, as Inteno, we see two obstacles in OpenWRT on its’ way to be the undisputed choice for the majority of the gateway vendors:

Configuration of an entity and data collection from the same entity cannot be achieved via single object:
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For any on-top applications Inteno or third party developers build (WebGUI, remote applications etc.) we have to interact with both UBUS and UCI (libuci or uci object on ubus) to be able to control a single entity. This makes it more difficult for developers as they have to know not only what ubus objects but also what uci files and sections they must interact with, and interacting with two components increases the number of the code they have to write. It also makes it quite complicated in terms of access control towards an entity of the software.

There are no ubus data models defined for controlling the entities:
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If there were data models defined for how to configure/control the different entities of the software (network, wireless. voice etc.), any application built on top of this data model would seamlessly work across different platforms and OpenWRT based systems as long as the applications controlling these entities were following the data model. Moreover, a defined data model for ubus based on a data model structure which addresses the first problem, UCI would no longer be mandatory which makes OpenWRT much easier to adapt to for many vendors out there.

We believe the solution to these problems would be developing a data model structure towards OpenWRT's ubus with features such as:
- JSON based, well formatted, easy to use/understand
- supports auto code and document generation
- contains version, properties (configuration), methods, valid data types/ranges, error codes per object
- allows configuration, data collection and actions within the same object as opposed to OpenWRT today where ubus methods + UCI (using ubus uci object or libuci or /sbin/uci directly) are used.

Supporting such a data model structure, the ultimate goal would be to create an OpenWrt data model to be standardized (ubus objects for controlling network, wireless, voice etc.) in order to achieve compatibility across different OpenWrt based systems.

IN THE ATTACHMENT, you will find the proposal in PDF format with more technical details and examples.

We believe this is a crucial step, when taken, will facilitate the adaptation of OpenWrt for the device vendors who are hesitant to it now as well as for application developers who depends on the availability of certain objects because they will not have to maintain different versions for different OpenWrt based systems.

Thank you for your attention and looking forward to your feedback.

Regards,
Sukru Senli
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