Grouper Developers Forum

[Jim Fox <>]

As we used to say when I was younger,

  Your old road is Rapidly agin'.
  Please get out of the new one
  If you can't lend your hand
  For the times they are a-changin'.

Some of our clients at the University want to act fast.  We have to
move with them or be left behind.  As a generic UI for group maintenance
is necessarily complicated,  maybe we can let some of out clients
implement their own groups UI -- one that is simpler but makes sense
to their users -- and use a webservice to update our campus-wide ldap service.

Our trial webservice supports both application clients, authenticating
with crtificates, and (possibly) browser user, authenticating with
shibboleth or pubcookie.  It allows basic group maintenance: creation 
and the maintenance of membership.  Maybe that works for most applications.
The use of XHTML allows the webservice to perform act as a minimal web
user interface.  And, as Bob says, REST is all the rage here.

Jim

> As I've mentioned, REST is all the rage around here.  Here is a writeup of a 
> recent design exercise on a RESTful interface to our existing non-Grouper 
> groups service:
>
>  https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/x/TpNh
>
> The meat of the resulting design, such as it is, is in sections 4 and 5.
>
> For background, UW's current groups service is minimal, basically a way to 
> import group info from various sources and export into an LDAP directory. So 
> the design so far is about reading and writing; no searching, no namespace 
> (stem) management, no subject source access, etc.  But I thought it could be 
> useful for folks to consider the approach.  In particular eyebrows might be 
> raised about the choice of XHTML for output rather than XML; I guess this is 
> a common suggestion for RESTful interfaces.
>
> - RL "Bob"