Node HTTP API

[eingenito]

There should be a standard HTTP API for nodes to support.

Summary

The current HTTP API offered by go-filecoin is a result of using the go-ipfs-cmds library. This CLI-oriented API was never designed as a general purpose API framework is awkward for developer-users:

• doesn’t support standard web patterns, e.g. for pagination
• doesn’t support client authentication
• not a widely-used or understood standard
• lacks rich tooling and support c.f. REST, gRPC or other common frameworks
• difficult to document as a wire format
• somewhat difficult to replicate outside of Go

A standard HTTP api could address these issues and offer the possibility of cross-implementation compatibility for tools that communicate with a node.

[anorth]

Thanks @eingenito! For those watching, @eingenito is leading research and design for this API. This issue isn't a request for the protocol specs team to do anything in particular. We do intend the majority of the HTTP API to be implementable by multiple Filecoin node implementations.