[Registry-dev] Using our Registry as a PURL server (and also making it work with non-Registry aware clients)

[Paul Fremantle]

+1. I think we need some small work on the model - I don't think its 
currently possible to send back a 301.

The reason I suggested a ?redirect is because I'm not sure we *always* 
want to send back a redirect. The user might just want the URL itself 
and store it locally.

Also while I like Glen's idea of a proxy, that is going to be hard in 
the case where the URL is a WebService or REST endpoint not just a 
remote WSDL. Because then you get into all sorts of tricky proxy issues 
like:
1) Scaling
2) Full support for the HTTP spec
3) Latency

Now I'd *love* to make Synapse a full HTTP proxy but that's a longer 
term goal. We can do the redirect right now.

Paul

Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> This can be done by having a media type handler for URL typed values (I 
> guess we'd need to define a media type for that) and having it set up to 
> write the response as a HTTP 301 with the value of the URL instead of a 
> text/plain with the URL value.
> 
> This is akin to how Windows implements symlinks sort of.
> 
> Sanjiva.
> 
> Paul Fremantle wrote:
>> So I've talked about this before.
>>
>> If we store URLs in the Registry, it would be nice to be able to point 
>> to the Registry entry and get back a redirect to the stored URL.
>>
>> This is actually the behaviour of PURL servers:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purl
>> http://purl.org
>>
>> So, what this means is that a client could direct their SOAP client to 
>> the registry URL: e.g.
>>
>> new 
>> Stub("http://reg/wso2registry/resource/services/finance/accounting?redirect"); 
>>
>>
>> The client library will then auto redirect to the real URL stored at
>> http://reg/wso2registry/resource/services/finance/accounting
>>
>> Paul
>>
> 

-- 
Paul Fremantle
CTO and Co-Founder, WSO2
OASIS WS-RX TC Co-chair
VP, Apache Synapse

Office: +44 844 484 8143
Cell: +44 798 447 4618

blog: http://pzf.fremantle.org
paul at wso2.com

"Oxygenating the Web Service Platform", www.wso2.com