[moby] [MOBY-dev] Martin's comments on the MOBY API docs

[Mark Wilkinson]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 09:59 -0400, Frank Gibbons wrote:

> >    * I disagree with labelling the deregisteService as depracated. As far
> >as I understood, it will be still around for quick resgiter/unregister
> >cycle where I am not conceedrn about security (that somebody can
> >deregister my service). So from the API point of view it is a normal
> >method, not a deprecated one. Mark?

It was the initial intention to remove it permanently from the API
because of the security problem, and have the agent do the
deregistration when the service provider removes their RDF signature;
however that decision is now in flux because of the need for rapid
register/deregister cycles.  As such, I haven't changed the 'deprecated'
status until this is resolved.

The behaviour right now is that a service can be deregistered using this
call if it was initially registered without a signatureURL.  I think
this is a reasonable way to go forward, but since we haven't turned the
agent on yet, it isn't entirely clear if this behaviour is sufficient to
accommodate the majority of cases.  It should be, so I'm be inclined to
de-deprecate that call and simply update the API to reflect its current
behaviour.


> There's even nothing wrong with writing the API as 
> we *wish* it to be (some would say that's how it should be done),

That's more or less how things have been going since the last MOBY
meeting - the API was being updated ahead of the code. I'm trying (more
successfully now than a couple of months ago) to keep them in sync, but
this is an extremely rapid development phase we are going through as we
approach the 1.0 release at the end of this month, so...  yeah... it's a
bit chaotic right now, and will be for the next few weeks.




> >    * some details have also categories cgi.soap, some not... I suggest to
> >remove all cgi and sopa for now (we will have in in the CVS if we need it
> >to re-introsduce it later; surely the 'soap' category bring nothing than a
> >confusion (isn't it current moby based on soap? - I know how it is, but
> >newbies perhaps not)

Yes, let's remove all references to anything other than "moby" category
from the API.  The code did support CGI GET service registrations after
the Singapore hackathon (and it probably still does, but it isn't being
tested regularly); however until we spend some time fully defining this
behaviour we should take it out.  I will update the code to prevent
anything other than "moby" registrations.



> >    * retrieveResourceURLs has a wrong description (something about providers)
> 
> I think is still under development - Mark?

I think it is working as advertised...??

M


-- 
"Ontologists do it with the edges!"

Mark Wilkinson
Asst. Professor
Dept. of Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre
St. Paul's Hospital
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Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
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