Add a resource to the api/artifacts endpoint to obtain versions of a given artifact

[jyoo980]

Following from the discussion from #992, cc @adpi2 @mlachkar, @julienrf.

I'm happy to write up an issue/ticket for this task (and possibly take it on), but I was wondering if folks had any preferences for how the resource should look like. I was thinking something like:

api/artifacts/<artifact name>/versions

But I'm not sure how flexible that would be. I think it would also be a good idea to think about how the response should look like. Do we want to return just the versions by themselves, or organized in some way that makes sense, e.g., something akin to the version matrix on the index. Any thoughts?

[adpi2]

That's a good question @jyoo980.

First thing is that we need the <group_id> in the url to distinguish between identical artifact names in different projects: api/artifacts/<group_id>/<artifact_name>

For instance, the artifact name core is used in many different projects.

Then the question is, should we use artifact_name or artifact_id?

artifact_name is more flexible because we can add the language and platform filters: one can load all the versions of an artifact that are compatible with Scala 3 and Scala.js 1.x. But then also, as you said, we should organize the versions in some way, e.g., something akin the version matrix. This would make it powerful but also harder for downstream users to consume: they need to parse the response and use some logic to build the artifact_id by combining artifact_name, language and platform. This is not impossible but also not convenient. In the long term, I am thinking of publishing a Scaladex library that can do all that: call the API, parse the response into our model and use our logic. But we are not there yet: we first need to make sure that the current model is stable.

For the time being we should go with <artifact_id> because it makes the endpoint simpler and more simple to use.

So the endpoint should be:

/api/artifacts/<group_id>/<artifact_id>/

and the response should be Page[String] where String is the string representation of SemanticVersion.

Using <artifact_id> instead of <artifact_name> is also consistent with the response of /api/artifacts in #992.

[jyoo980]

Issue opened here to capture this work. Will populate it later with more information.