Notes on SDef and SDep Improvements

Proposal notes for London Committers' Meeting, Feb. 23-24, 2010:

1. Refinements in the scope of the Fedora 3.3 Service Mapping
   1. Tweaking the ServiceMapper class
      1. More robust port-to-method binding
      2. Define and Implement a pluggable interface
      3. FCREPO 619: ServiceDeployment WSDL cannot specify relative URIs in http:address
   2. More input parm binding options
      1. bind to DC element
      2. bind to object of RDF triple
      3. bind to a system or environment property
   3. Improving documentation and validation
      1. Documenting the role and relationship of similar structures in SDef/SDep
      2. A trouble-shooting/analysis tool to identify problems (perhaps part of an EZService bundle)
2. WSDL Descriptions: Front-end and back-end
   1. WSDL 2 support
   2. Delivery of composed WSDL for clients at service endpoints
   3. FCREPO-52: WSDL Should Declare Faults 
   4. FCREPO-500 ; writeable disseminators, REST-as-service, POST support for (hopefully) idempotent services?
3. FCREPO-16: SDeps with SOAP Bindings
   1. Back-end with Datastreams (SOAPInputParm? DSInputParm@passBy='VALUE'?)
   2. Front-end as service (follow-on to FCREPO-500?)

3.2 Notes

1. Only supports one wsdl:service definition (contra WSDL 1.1), multiple wsdl:service elements will override previous
   • This is dependent on the WSDLParser, which only allows a single service; as well as the ServiceMapper, which only expects one
2. FCREPO-16: Does not support SOAP message bindings
3. Effectively limited to one port (operations are all mapped to the first port with an HTTP binding)
   • see ServiceMapper.merge();
   • Consequence: Operations can't be grouped according to http:address, so different service hosts mean only LOCAL addressing can work
4. FCREPO 619: ServiceDeployment WSDL cannot specify relative URIs in http:address
   • Does allow local.fedora.server variable as location
5. Effectively limited to a single portType (WSDLParser has one Service, Service class has one PortType)
6. Appears to require all portTypes to include all abstract message types? (still looking into this)

Wishlist

1. Allow multiple ports and port types
2. Clarify documentation on meaning of required parms and default values in SDef and SDep