Hi All,

IMS will hold a one-day meeting to decide how we will produce RESTful bindings for our service descriptions i.e. an alternative to the Web Service bindings that we already produce.

The meeting will be held at the Florida Virtual School (Orlando, USA) on Wednesday the 10th Feb 2010.

Anticipated Outcomes

. To agree the best practices to be adopted by IMS when creating REST-based bindings for Service Models;

. To define how these best practices are to be supported using the IMS Binding Auto-generation Toolkit (I-BAT).

Agenda

12:30-13:00 Introductions

13:00-13:30 Service Bindings Overview
. IMS Service Bindings
. CRUD-based service descriptions
. Set of IMS Specs that require REST Bindings

13:30-15:15 REST Binding Approaches
. Review alternative approaches and identify strengths/weaknesses

15:15-15:30 Break

15:30-17:00 REST Binding Best Practices Guidelines
. Agree best practice recommendations
. Identifying service errors

17:00-17:30 Way Forward
. Future Timetable

17:30 Close


Colin S.

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

Edited: 01/28/2010 at 02:59 PM by colinsmythe

Hi All,

Please note that this meeting will now be held on WEDNESDAY 10th February 2010.
The LOCATION is UNCHANGED (Florida Virtual School, Orlando- as part of the IMS Quarterly meeting).

Colin S.

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

Hi All,

We have changed the agenda. the meeting will now start at 12:30 noon and will end at 17:30pm. This should allow for a broader participation of IMS members.

Colin S.

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

Hi All,

We had an excellent meeting to discuss REST. I will be posting some minutes later in the week.

The primary outcome is that we agreed to start writing a document to address the issues/guidance for supporting REST-oriented bindings. It is clear there are several approaches and our aim is to facilitate supporting REST as opposed to imposing a single solution (we doubt that there is one approach that will suit all needs).

Colin S.

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

ACTIONS

A20100210/01 Colin S. - obtain Icodeon's paper on creating URL-based bindings (tbc - 31st March, 2010);

A20100210/02 Colin S. - obtain Medbiquitous recommendations on REST bindings (tbc - 31st March, 2010);

A20100210/03 Colin S. - obtain ATOM Pub approach to REST bindings (tbc - 31st March, 2010);

A20100210/04 Colin S. - obtain SWORD approach to REST bindings (tbc - 31st March, 2010);

A20100210/05 Colin S. - to post Draft 1 of the Binding Guidelines (tbc - 21st May, 2010).

POINTS FOR CONSIDERATION

* REST is resource-based - this gives rise to the question of when to use REST. From the IMS perspective this is for the Proj Groups to decide on a per binding basis. However, we do not to establish general guidelines of how to achieve REST-based bindings when a Proj Group wants to produce them;

* What will be our approach to the payloads
- Consider data-centric payload definitions e.g. XML or JSON
- Alternatively use URL approach to passing the data (see Icodeon approach)
- This gives use a parameter vs XML doc fragment approaches

* Examples of approaches to REST include:
- Simple LIS from Inigral as there approach to the LIS spec based on URLs)
- Del.icio.us approach
- Look at ATOM Pub
- Look at SWORD

* If we take an XML fragment approach the we must consider:
- Full range of HTTP calls (how to denote this on our PSM representations?)
- HTTP POST only.

* This leads to the following questions to be answered by the Guidelines:
- How to map service operations to a URL and how to handle data collections?
- How to combine service-orienetd and resource-oriented binding approaches in the same Info Model representation?
- How to decide when to use REST and SOAP?
- When to use URL parameters or XML fragments?
- When to use just HTTP POST or the full set of HTTP verbs?
- How should the IMS statusInfo object be supported in REST bindings?

DELIVERABLE DATES

* 21st May, 2010 - IMS GLC REST Bindings Guidelines - Draft 1.

ATTENDEES

David Massart - European Schoolnet (Belgium)
Linda Feng - Oracle (USA)
Frederic Bergeron - TELUQ (Canada)
Lance Neumann - Blackboard.com (USA)
Ko YoungSeung - Dunet (Korea)
Daniel Rehak - ADL (USA)
Angelo Panar - ADL (USA)
Alan Zaitchik - Jenzabar (USA)
Cho YongSang - KERIS (Korea)
Michael Huneke - Learning Objects (USA)
Karen Kuffner - University of Michigan (USA)
Charles Severance - IMS GLC (USA)
Colin Smythe - IMS GLC (UK)
Willbert Kraan - JISC-CETIS (UK)
Greg McFall - Pearson Education (USA)
Jeroen Hamers - Kennisnet Foundation (Netherlands)

SCRIBE

Colin Smythe - IMS GLC (UK)

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

Hi All,

Below are the details for the URL-based REST approach used by Icodeon.
Thanx to Warwick Bailey for providing the info.

Colin S.

---------------

The Icodeon CC Platform REST API documentation is being developed
(currently incomplete) here:

http://api.common-cartridge.com/ndoc/index.html


The URL will eventually change (the www.common-cartridge.com domain name
is used to improve SEO, and once in production we will have some other
domain name). The documentation will always be referenced from here (link
half way down page):

http://ccplatform.blogspot.com...eon-common.html


For more examples of using the URL Language with the Icodeon Common
Cartridge Platform, see the CC Platform Blog:

http://ccplatform.blogspot.com/

http://ccplatform.blogspot.com...pen-social.html


The URL Language with the Icodeon Common Cartridge Platform is strongly
influenced by the Open Social RESTful Protocol Specification, as well as
the RESTful Web Services text by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby.

http://www.opensocial.org/Tech...l#rfc.section.7

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect

Hi All,

The various Medbiquitous docs on REST and Web Services are available as:

* Knowing When to REST: Simple Object Access Protocol vs. Representational State Transfercompares two popular approaches to Web Services and outlines when it is appropriate to use each. (PDF, 69 KB) - http://www.medbiquitous.org/st...nowingwhentorest.pdf;

* The REST Web Service Design Guidelines provide recommendations for leveraging Representational State Transfer to develop Web Services. (PDF, 113 KB) - http://www.medbiquitous.org/st...s/RESTguidelines.pdf;

*The Web Services Design Guidelines provide a consistent approach to Web services development that facilitates interoperability among disparate systems and compatibility with Web Services Interoperability recommendations. (PDF, 92 KB) - http://www.medbiquitous.org/st...rvicesguidelines.pdf.


Colin S.

-------------------------
Colin Smythe
IMS GLC Chief Architect