Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

Thanks for the feedback on the un-eponymous RESTful web service 
presentation. At some point, perhaps post v1.5.0, we'll reassess how 
grouper's web services are doing and potentially retune.

A recent development in the grouper toolkit is the "grouper client", 
which might serve your purpose within comanage. Check it out. If so, 
that's one less thing you guys would need to maintain going forward.

<https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Grouper+Client>
<https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Software+Download>

Tom

Scotty Logan wrote:
> On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:50 AM, Tom Barton wrote:
> > First, grouper web services expose RESTful interfaces as well as 
> > SOAP-based ones.
>
> Well, the RestLite services are almost REST, but not really.  The 
> non-Lite Rest services are really XML-RPC.  Many of the basics are 
> wrong, including:
>
> o they use POST for searching (kinda like using UPDATE instead of SELECT 
> in SQL)
> o when the Accepts header is not used, the mime-type gets specified in 
> the middle of the URL, rather than at the end
> o POST is used to create new entities rather than PUT, even though the 
> entities' names are known
> o the output contains junk data (extra result codes, response times, 
> etc.) along with the representation of the requested entity
> o few, if any, of the returned representations contain links to other 
> entities - e.g. a group representation should contain links to 
> representations of its members
>
> As RL Bob and I pointed out a year ago on the grouper list, UW already 
> has a good design for a RESTful groups API:
>
>     https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/groups/UW+Groups+Web+Service+Design+Workshop 
>
>
> There's also some work being done on RESTful JSON, to standardize how 
> links are represented in JSON.
>
> > Second, if you do go for a CLI-based approach, I'm curious what gsh 
> > lacks that would motivate you to write another CLI to grouper. Could 
> > you guys report out about that?
>
> What we wrote wasn't another CLI, it was a tool that could be used from 
> a CLI, that returns Unix error codes (0 on success, 1 on failure), and 
> with easily parsed output.
>
> > Longer term (and maybe even short term), I'd think grouper's REST 
> > interfaces are the way to go. Your feedback about any gap between what 
> > they offer and what you need would be very valuable for the project.
>
> The tool uses the SOAP interface... the non-RESTful REST interface was 
> too distracting.
>
>   Scotty