[arin-discuss] Bringing back IP resource Request Templates

[John Curran]

On Apr 2, 2012, at 3:52 PM, Morizot Timothy S wrote:

> My organization isn't an ISP and makes changes infrequently enough that they are done manually whether by email template or via the web interface. So that aspect of it makes little difference to us. However, I can certainly see why those who make frequent changes and have put automated tools in place to make those changes might have an issue.
> 
> And as someone with a couple of decades of application development experience, I have a hard time with the "expensive" argument in this situation. An email template or a web form are just two different front-end interfaces. You might need a different parser for each, but once the resource request is parsed the code handling the actual request processing should be the same for both front-ends. Even if the web front-end had additional options, those would just be additional requests to process and wouldn't change the ones shared with the email templates.
> 
> I guess I don't see why a system that accepts requests through two (or more) front-end interfaces should be hard or expensive to maintain -- especially when the range of available requests is relatively limited, as it is with ARIN.

We are maintaining two interfaces at present (ARIN Online for humans, 
RESTful for programmatic access)   We can add more programmatic interfaces 
(such as xml, java, etc.) or additional semi-programmatic ones (email 
templates, telnet or ftp interfaces, rje over tcp, ... :-)

In any case, the maintenance expense (for an organization of our size) is 
increases with each access method because the front-end parsers need to be 
updated with policy changes.  If number resource policy changes less over 
time (e.g. with increasing movement to IPv6) then it is not as significant, 
but that particular timeline remains uncertain.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN