Re: [alf-dev] RE: ALF Source Code Mangement Vocabulary Meeting+1-303-928

[Mark Phippard <markp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

alf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 05/03/2006 05:08:48 PM:

> Fair enough. I suppose then that the smaller the use case the better. 
> It's pretty safe to push it to the user to know what her tools support, 
> although it's not the most friendly thing to do. I'll admit to 
> occassionally get lost in trying to understand just how an ALF service 
> flow gets created and executed.

I think with the vocabularies we are striving for some consistency, but I 
imagine there are always going to be subtle differences that you are going 
to have to know about your tool.  For example, a lot of tools do not 
support versioned metadata, so their WSDL would likely not include those 
services.

As I understand it, ALF is kind of a broker.  It receives events from 
tools and then initiates the service flows that you have asked to have 
executed when that event is received.  The flows themselves will be 
defined in your BPEL engine/tool (or will ALF include a tool to define 
them?).  What the flow can do will depend on the services that you have 
available to you based on the products you use.

Imagine an event that comes in to do a build.  The service flow might ask 
the SCM tool to check something out to some location, and perhaps produce 
some kind of change log using a history method.  Then, assuming success, 
it moves on and asks the build tool to build what is in that location 
etc...  So the build tool did not have to communicate with the SCM tool, 
but there is still some shared information that the user provides like 
where to do the build from, the build script, where to look for the change 
log etc...

ALF provides the automation and it reduces the needs for the various tools 
to directly integrate with each other.

At least that is how I see it. 

> Just using what the WSDL exposes is probably good enough. I suppose I 
> was thinking there would be one CVS WSDL but in reality there would be 
> different versions of WSDL for different versions of a product.

We will produce a WSDL that describes our vocabulary, but it is still up 
to SCM providers to provide the services and ultimately they will provide 
the WSDL for the services they provide and deem to be important enough to 
support.

Mark

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