Fedora's forthcoming Google Summer of Code project (for which I'll be one of the mentors) is centered on this Jira issue:
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-452 the replacement of Apache Axis 1.3 as SOAP web service engine. At the last committers' call, a question arose which seemed to merit discussion more widely than in that meeting. Historically, Fedora has built out web services with a "contract-first" or "WSDL-first" approach. That is, WSDL documents declaring the APIs to be implemented were written and then code generation proceeds from those documents to Java stubs and thence to implementations. Another approach is "code-first", in which model classes are written and then using Java annotations or another technique, WSDL and other associated materials are generated by the web service library. Both techniques have good and bad points, and neither is an obvious choice for most projects. What's more, it is possible, although less usual, to blend the techniques, and this question doesn't amount to an exclusive choice. Before giving guidance to our GSoC student who will be undertaking implementation, we thought we would try to gather some thinking and opinions from the larger Fedora developer community around this issue and how we might guide our student. We know that opinions can be fiercely held on this kind of design issue, but we wanted to gather as much input as possible. This question also intersects to some extent with another that was raised-- the _precise_ scope of the project. The narrowest construal of the Jira issues involved touches only the SOAP interfaces to Fedora. It's increasingly common, however, for web services frameworks to support more than one architectural style and most of the candidates for our replacement library do. The question here is just how far our student should be considering the Fedora web services (SOAP and REST) as a unified presentation of Fedora vs. how far to consider the SOAP services in isolation. Again we find here a spectrum, not an exclusive choice, so we thought it would be worthwhile again to gather opinions and thinking. --- A. Soroka Online Library Environment the University of Virginia Library ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-developers
