Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

Following are a few more questions that occur to me as I think about 
what next steps the grouper team should take towards providing an 
initial form of a web services interaction style. Please share your 
insights!

Is a REST approach less work to develop and support on-going than a SOAP 
approach? Does the answer depend on whether you adopt the server or 
client perspective? Or does the answer turn on other dependencies?

Either way, should we *initially* aim to provide a rather 
straight-through mapping of the grouper API's capabilities into a web 
services interaction style?

Or should we instead aim to *initially* provide a smaller, perhaps 
somewhat abstracted, set of group information and group management services?

Should we develop a definition of a standard "groups-lite" interface as 
part of this web services work? As an independent standard, it would 
maximally isolate the grouper web services interface from the underlying 
grouper java API, and it could be a Good Thing to bring to the world in 
any case. But can we get away without having to do quite so much up 
front work?

And more concretely, what, if anything, should we ask ChrisH to do to 
provide us with a prototype experience with which to kick some tires?

Finally, whether or not you write a reply to this email, I invite you to 
discuss such things on the grouper-dev conference call this Wednesday.

Thanks,
Tom