Web service interface (server?) for Drupal

This actually already exists in the Services module

http://drupal.org/project/services

It provides pluggable front ends (REST, XMLRPC, SOAP, etc) and whatever backend services you want. For instance there is a node service that returns full nodes.

I would love to see more coverage of core functionality in the services clients, but its hard for me to see it being a SoC project. They're really easy to write.

Yes, covered by services - in fact services+json_server+view.Service.getView == views_json. The latter module could be deprecated AFIAK. I think a lot more Services work could be done to get full services coverage of Drupal core. RIght now the available services apis is pretty light. While in general they are easy to write - there is a lot of them - and adding simpletests would be a lot of effort too so I could see this as filling up a SOC project. I feel like the Services evangilist - I just happen to use it and think its cool but its come up on about 5 other SOC proposals - I think it should be included in at least one of them but these X students need to coordinate.

You might want to check out these Drupal core issues related to alternative methods of node rendering useful in part for web services:

http://drupal.org/node/134478
http://drupal.org/node/218830
http://drupal.org/node/193311

The status is "Student proposal - needs work"

What shall I do next to make it an official idea?

Thanks,

Hi! Yeah, what you outlined is already possible with the Services module and the REST Server. The REST server allows you to make requests like:

http://RemoteSite/Drupal/services/rest?method=xxx&parameterA=xxx&parameterB=xxx ...

....And retrieve an XML response. There are a lot of things wrong with the Services module though, so take a look at the issue queue and see what you come up with. OAuth support is something that was talked about at Drupalcon this year in Boston (hint hint).