Fwd: Re: [cddlm] deployment API

[esmith4 at inf.ed.ac.uk]

Hey all,

Our client/server implementation is largely complete (in the loosest
sense of the word - much of the client code is of abysmal quality due
to the tightness of the deadline at the end).

One feature that struck me as potentially useful in the CDDLM standard
would be support for querying the deployment descriptor that the
application came from. With all the security caveats aside, this is
a fairly useful feature for long running services from a usability
issue. Having just completed our client, I shied away from providing
this functionality out of band or through one of the xsd:any loopholes
CDDLM provides for various reasons. But it would be very useful to
be able to query the deployment descriptor, perhaps through an optional
element in the application description. Having that element strongly
typed and available in WSDL would make it all a lot easier to code.

I am also somewhat converted to the magic of application names having
written a moderate client now. Its easy to forget how horrific URIs
are from an end user perspective and "friendly" names are probably a
must. It'll be useful to have the server track them. I suggest that
they should just be labels rather than rating at the same level as
references: having the server return them in the application info
is quite sufficient from the perspective of a client developer, and
doesnt raise all the problems that I worried about before.

I'm still working with the API from 10/11/4 so I'm not sure how far the
API has progressed since then. A destroy operation in addition to
terminate would've been nice, although in the end I didn't have time
to implement terminate anyway, infact the only two meaningful operations
on our server are "create" and "serverStatus". Its probably useful
to support that kind of cut down approach though, as it broadens the
scope to include people like us who are more interested in dynamic
deployment of static configurations.

Ed