Standard SPARQL Protocol Endpoint

Semantic Web, Standard Interfaces, REST API

This feature would provide a standard, discoverable SPARQL protocol endpoint for Fedora repositories as an alternative to the Fedora-specific RISearch web interface. For more information, see FCREPO-533.

Mentor Needed

Support for Memento (X-Accept-Datetime) in Fedora's REST API

Standard Interfaces, REST API

The Memento framework aims to make browsing the web's history easy through the use of extended HTTP headers and browser awareness of such headers. This feature would add Memento capabilities to Fedora's REST API to make it possible for such browsing to occur over the resources stored in a Fedora repository. We do have an early implementation of such capability for Fedora, but it was never integrated into the baseline. Fedora's code and the Memento specification has changed since then, so an up to date implementation is needed. For more information, see FCREPO-604.

Mentor Needed

Migrate to a modern SOAP library and support SOAP with Attachments.

Standard Interfaces, SOAP API

Fedora has used Axis 1.3 for SOAP support for quite some time. This is an outdated library and better alternatives (with better support for SOAP attachements) have come along. This improvement would update Fedora to use a modern Java SOAP library and move away from Axis 1.3. In addition, it would update Fedora's SOAP API to use SOAP with attachments where appropriate. For more information, see FCREPO-102 and FCREPO-452.

Mentor Needed

Modern Web-based "Administrator" UI for Fedora

User Interface, REST API

There are currently two Administrator user interfaces that come with Fedora: One that we have had for many years is a Java Swing-based GUI and the other is an Adobe Flash-based UI. Neither UI is ideal -- The Swing-based UI requires deploying a Java application on users' desktops, and the Flash-based UI is based on a technology (Adobe Flex) that we have had a difficult time maintaining. This feature would revamp Fedora's Administrator UI to be a more pure HTML/Javascript application that takes advantage of standard features of modern browsers. It may use signed java applets or Flash in limited contexts (such as multi-file uploads), but should be primarily based on modern Javascript/HTML features and libraries such as jQuery.

Mentor Needed

Deploy standalone webserver on localhost for integration testing

Integration tests: SOAP API, REST API, Disseminations

There are currently a number of integration tests that rely on network access to resources served by external web services.  Additionally, there are a number of bugs and features that address Fedora backend HTTP client/server transactions (disseminators that retrieve content from external web services, external datastreams, etc.), but there is currently no automated way to test these transactions.  This improvement to the integration test suite would start up a web server on localhost on a high-numbered port and serve up a number of test resources, which integration tests could then use to test interactions with external web services.  This web server would only be part of the integration test suite, and would run only for the duration of the tests.  As a side benefit of this improvement, all tests could be run, regardless of whether the host machine is connected to the network or not.

Mentor Needed