Grouper Developers Forum

["Stephen M. Barrett" <>]

I'm being pressured into Ruby but I've not enough experience to help out much with this that at this time.

I have enough experience to point a Flex/Flash application at a Grouper WS and see what happens.  Flex is a very nice way to create something flashy with lots of bells and whistles which uses web services as the application content provider/data store.

Chris Hyzer wrote:

Stephen,

 

Thanks for raising this issue.

 

For clients which are not using Java, then I think the Java service class is not what should be looked at, but rather the WSDL and example XML.  This is the integration point, not Java.  Granted the XML that Axis generates based on the Java types might not be what we would decide on as a group would be most efficient, but it is not terrible.  Hopefully there are toolkits like Axis for whatever language you are using which would generate classes in that language so you wouldn’t have to worry about it.  And I hope that people in whatever language can post examples about it.  If the only code generation we gain from SOAP is Java and .NET, then I think there is still a huge gain.  The Grouper team will have a lot web service operations to maintain (and I think some non-simple data-structures), and if we can do it automatically and not roll XML by hand it would be a lot more reliable and less expensive to maintain/test for the grouper project.  So the other technologies which do not yet have WSDL->code generation can just hand-roll the XML that Axis auto generated.

 

That being said, if we *do specify* the XML and have all services as String input -> String output or something simple, Xstream is a free jar which does this well, and grouper could use that.

 

Is that an acceptable answer?  J

 

Maybe we need an example client to connect to my proof of concept service to show how this would work (to me or others).  If someone is a whiz web service client developer in non-java, and has some extra cycles, let me know and we can get something working against my proof of concept, and we can post the code.

 

This is definitely a topic to discuss at the next dev-meeting, and I added the issue to the web services grouper page.

 

Kind regards!

Chris

 

 

From: Stephen M. Barrett []
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 10:10 AM
To: Chris Hyzer
Cc:
Subject: Re: [grouper-dev] Web services prototype done

 

Chris, I am concerned that the return type is a defined java class.  This would indicate that clients must possess the appropriate java client package to take advantage of the service.  This has several disadvantages.  The first being that other languages would not be able to easily consume the service.  The second is that all client SW would have a version dependency on the Grouper SW which is difficult to support.  I wonder if we can find a way to support an array of objects and elements without requiring the return type to be "edu.internet2.middleware.grouper.webservices.WsSubject".

It may be better to simply deal with raw XML for formated I/O and simple types for all other parameters.

But this is great progress.  Nice going.


Chris Hyzer wrote:

I did a simple web services prototype.  The details are here:

https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/WS+-+Proof+of+Concept+2007-10-2007

The original Grouper web services page is here, with updated issues and items at bottom.

https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Grouper+-+Web+Services

Please give me any feedback.  I will continue to work on it.  Hopefully we can discuss it at the next dev call.

As you mention doing a simple search for subjects it would be worth taking

into account the 1.0 Subject API. It loses 'type' as a first class

Gary, thanks for the head's up.  At this point I will just call the same methods that the UI calls, so if we fix the UI with the proper Subject API, the web services will probably be fixed also.  But lets discuss this task a the next call to make sure the order of operations is optimal.

Kind regards,

Chris

--On 07 December 2007 03:11 -0500 Chris Hyzer  wrote:

Hey grouper-devs,

I added information to the wiki based on emails and discussions we

have had recently.  Note that not everything is there, only things

that seemed like they had some consensus.  Let me know of additions

you would like to see, or feel free to add them yourself.

https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Grouper+-+Web+

Ser

vices

I am a grouper team member working on web services, fyi.  So expect

more communications about web services in the next few weeks/months.

I will be building a prototype in Axis to do a simple Soap web service

(e.g. simple search for a subject).  Then I would like to make a Rest

version of the same logic.  Let me know if you have any advice or

concerns.

Kind regards,

Chris

 

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