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RE: [alf-dev] ALF SCM Vocabulary compared to WebDAV VersioningExtensions
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alf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 05/03/2006 10:21:21 AM:
> One issue is that WebDAV is not a SOAP based web service and is not
> (probably cannot be) described by WSDL. Thus it isn't directly usable
from
> BPEL. (should double check to be sure I'm not missing something)
>
> I have a general impression that the versioning part of WebDAV has had
mixed
> acceptence and spotty implementation but I'll leave it to others to
expand on that.
>
> Both WebDAV and JSR are client oriented and have the same "workspace"
issue
> that we need to address to avoid streaming files through the BPEL
engine.
>
> Thus I believe neither is directly applicable although clearly they are
both
> good sources to leverage and validate against. It would be a good
exercise
> to reference the equivalent concepts and operarations of these two
sources
> in our document.
I cannot help but think we are getting off the tracks here.
First off, the WebDAV DeltaV Extensions and the referenced JSR 147 are
both essentially failed projects even though they included participation
by a lot of the top vendors. If we keep expanding the scope of what we
are doing we are going to head in the same direction. It seems like the
SCM Vocabulary discussion has started to head down the road of talking
about how an SCM Client would talk to an SCM Server. I was not at the
last meeting so maybe this has been clarified already. Anyway, that seems
like it is not the intent of what we were doing with ALF, at least as I
perceived it.
In terms of ALF and SCM it seems like we should be thinking about:
1) What kinds of "event notifications" should an SCM system send to the
ALF Event Manager. For example, "a check-in has just happened by user X
of files A B and C referencing issue ID 123" Or something like that.
2) What kinds of basic services should an SCM provider expose so that ALF
Service Flows and other tools can work with the system. This can easily
expand to becoming a full-blown SCM. I think we should try to keep it
simple and limit it to the kinds of tools we can envision wanting to
interact with an SCM system. I also do not think we should try to attempt
this workspace management stuff. If we do, we are likely to fail given
that these other projects all have.
3) Finally, is there any room in ALF for prescribing "validation" events?
In other words, could an SCM tool send an event to ALF that indicates a
user was about to do a check-in. And ALF could then initiate some kind of
service flow that ultimately said whether or not it was OK? This seems
like it could get really complicated to define but it has a lot of room to
add value. For example, perhaps we want to validate that the check-in is
associated with an issue, and that the issue is in a state with the
necessary approvals to allow the work to be done? I could also see
wanting to do style or security checking but that would mean a client
would have to somehow provide the contents of the local changes and I
cannot see that being possible.
What this gets back to is something I have brought up previously and that
is that it seems like we are lacking the necessary "vision statements"
that describe the intent and limits of the project and its pieces. It is
great to have "grand ideas" but if we ever want to ship and be useful it
seems like we need to be more focused and realistic. I am all in favor of
referencing something like WebDAV or JSR-147 in order to "borrow" the
terminology choices they made. I would even say that is a good idea to do
so since those projects had broad industry participation. But if we start
heading down the same roads they did in terms of the scope of our project
it seems like we are destined to fail.
Mark
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