RDAP?

[DavidAnderson684]

What are your thoughts on supporting RDAP as well as WHOIS?

The .uk registrar (and I expect others will follow) is ending WHOIS support: https://theukdomain.uk/rdap/ . I'd guess that many users of this library, like me, don't care so much about the underlying WHOIS protocol, as about having a convenient client to use to look up whether a domain is registered, what the domain's expiry date is, etc.

Presumably RDAP libraries exist, and as a coder I can plumb the logic for "use the RDAP library for a .uk domain, use the WHOIS library for others", and change the list of TLDs being routed each way over time. However, I wonder that's something you're already thinking of since, as I say, I suspect many users of this project are using it because mainly of the results. Keeping it restricted it to only results that can be fetched by one specific protocol will limit its future usefulness.

[kevinoo]

Hi @DavidAnderson684,

What are your thoughts on supporting RDAP as well as WHOIS?

I think RDAP support is definitely a direction phpWhois should pursue.

My expectation is that WHOIS will gradually be replaced by RDAP, at least for an increasing number of TLDs. Because of that, I don't think it makes sense to treat RDAP as something specific to .uk; rather, .uk could be a good starting point for introducing RDAP support into phpWhois.
My initial idea would be to try RDAP first and fall back to WHOIS when RDAP is not available for a given TLD. This would allow existing users to continue using phpWhois without having to care about which protocol is used underneath. What do you think? 😃

Regarding the response format, I would initially keep the existing output format for compatibility, while adding an "rdap" key containing the raw RDAP response. The RDAP data could then be mapped into the current phpWhois structure as much as possible.
In the longer term, I think it would also make sense to consider a larger API change where both WHOIS and RDAP responses are normalized into a single, protocol-independent structure. That would probably be a breaking change, though, so I would rather approach that separately.

I'll create a dedicated issue for RDAP support tomorrow so we can discuss the implementation and gradually add support, starting with .uk.

Thanks a lot for the development tip ❤️

[DavidAnderson684]

Thank you. You see things pretty much exactly as I do.

Though, in terms of "the longer term", as I understand things, the longer term is universal RDAP. (Of the several domain extensions I tried, the only one which didn't get a response from https://rdap.org/domain/($domain) was the .me extension. So the longer term may mean people only need a layer like this one for any hold-outs, or because they're managing legacy code).

[DavidAnderson684]

One subtlety I've learned:

As per https://about.rdap.org/ - a 404 from https://rdap.org/domain/($domain) means "I don't know where this domain can be looked up". Whereas if you get a 302 redirect, then 404 from the destination URL means "this domain is not registered".

[DavidAnderson684]

I'd not registered, when writing the above, that rdap.org is not an official resource - it's a personal project.