[Registry-dev] orm and resource associations

[Glen Daniels]

Hi Sanjiva, Norman, all:

Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> Thanks for the detailed feedback and rationale.

+1

> The registry is really designed to store *arbitrary* content .. as such 
> there's really no special storage handling for any type of data. As Paul 
> said in his reply its certainly possible to implement an ORMRegistry 
> (and we'd definitely welcome such a contribution), but I don't quite get 
> it. Do you expect to look at the media type of the resource being stored 
> to figure out how to map the data into a certain object type and then 
> use the ORM mapper to store that into the database? We currently don't 
> "deserialize" any resource before we store it .. we treat it at a blob 
> of bytes and drop it in. That of course comes at a cost- you can't query 
> into structured resources, but it make the registry highly scalable to 
> anything.

Actually, some of what we're doing/planning with respect to 
Axis2/Synapse repositories and WSDL data might be along the lines of 
what Norman's looking for in terms of typing, but without the ORM - 
basically a way to tag particular areas of the registry as containing 
"interesting" stuff that wants to run through some kind of processing 
(whether custom indexing, validation, etc) based on its type.  That 
custom processing could certainly be arbitrarily extended.

I'd be curious to see some detailed scenarios for how Norman envisions 
using this stuff....

--Glen