Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Chris Hyzer <>]

Hey grouper-users,

 

We are planning to add web services to grouper in the next major release (v1.3 in spring ‘08).

 

Grouper developers have been discussing requirements, and I wanted to summarize them to you, and solicit more opinions and needs.  Please give me any feedback.

 

Here is the Grouper Web Service wiki:

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

 

Here is a questionnaire from Gary Brown that a handful of organizations have responded to:

https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/x/bkk

 

Below are some of the current requirements that multiple organizations would like to have (also on wiki).  After gathering all requirements, we need to get consensus on what we want to deliver in Grouper, and what of that will be in the initial release v1.3.

 

WEB SERVICE TYPE (granted there are specifics in each that need to be flushed out):

-          Soap

-          Rest

 

API

-          Some people would like to have the full API exposed by the current UI

-          Others only need commonly used operations

-          Batched operations (e.g. add 100 subjects to a group at once)

-          Transaction support (if any fails in one batch request, rollback all in that single batch request)

 

AUTHENTICATION:

-          Let container or web server handle

o   PKI

o   http-simple-auth

o   Source IP address filtering

-          WS-Security

o   PKI

o   Kerberos

-          Proxying.  Need the web service to execute operations based on an underlying user

 

AUTHORIZATION:

-          Not sure of specific recommendation, but it was mentioned that it need to be addressed, including proxy authorization

 

ERROR HANDLING:

-          Need a consistent strategy

 

VERSIONING:

-          Would be nice if new versions of operations where backwards compatible with  existing clients

 

CLIENTS:

-          Grouper will provide a quick start with Java, and it is up to users to create their own clients.  Would be good if people posted examples from various languages for everyone to benefit

-          Will provide a WSDL for the Soap service, and possibly an XML Schema for Rest (only if using XML as a formatting language)

 

WEB SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION:

-          At this point, probably Apache Axis

 

GROUPER API UPGRADES:

-          Transaction support for multiple API calls

-          Search engine (e.g. for subject search, to speed things up and search for synonyms (e.g. Robert, Bob, etc)

 

EXISTING IMPLEMENTATIONS / ORGANIZATIONS WITH IMMEDIATE NEEDS

-          Grid Grouper already has a web service implementation

-          newcastle.ac.uk is interested and is working on some examples

-          cornell has some working examples based on Axis and jws files

-          I will be helping with code for the Grouper team

 

Kind regards,

Chris