Hi Matt, On Jan 8, 2008 3:17 AM, Matt Zukowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Now, aside from the above, I get the feeling that John is not especially > excited about all this RESTful stuff -- not the way Pat and I are anyway. > Maybe we haven't made a good case for it, or maybe it's just not really how > John envisioned OpenWFEru evolving. Either way, it would be tough to try to > get this off the ground unless John is equally interested in seeing it > happen. > Furthermore, I think that it would be a mistake to see this RESTful > stuff as just an API -- a way of talking to the OWFE engine (and I think > that's how John sees it).
If you had some time to write down a few words more about this last paragraph, it is very interesting. > Coming up with this API demands a fair bit of > reflection back on the engine itself ( i.e. thinking about it in terms of > 'resources'), and I personally found this exercise unexpectedly frustrating. > I'm still not sure if this is because I just don't get John's architectural > decisions (likely because I'm fairly new to thinking about BPM systems), or > because there are some dubious semantics hiding in there. In any case, as it > stands, I think building a meaningful RESTful API around OpenWFEru may be > difficult unless some conceptual accommodation is made in the underlying > system (and this is 1) hard, and 2) not fun). I was stuck 4 years back. I had to start thinking myself about a RESTful API for OpenWFEru to start realising what you just explained. Sorry for being so slow. Since those Fluxr discussions, the engine as changed a lot, so some of the hard / not fun aspects may have vanished. Fluxr may have been side-tracked but it has certainly influenced OpenWFEru. Here is where I ended up (for the record) : http://jmettraux.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/restful-workflow-engine/ > In regards to the original topic here: John, I agree. A centralized > authentication/authorization system in the style of restful_authentication > would be a good, useful thing, and the "standalone project" you're referring > to may turn out to be RubyCAS -- at least this is how I see the project > evolving. Support for OpenID is already in the works, as is a RESTful > version of the CAS protocol. This might make both you and Pat happy, in that > RubyCAS would be able to authenticate against OpenID, while providing a > restful_authentication-like interface. (Support for OpenAuth may be a > problem, but in any case I think we should deal with authentication before > authorization, since it's possible can get by with just the former). Matt, you're great. http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-server/ http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-client/ +1 Best regards, -- John Mettraux -///- http://jmettraux.openwfe.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenWFEru dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/openwferu-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
