[wsf-c-dev] content on WSF/C on wso2.org

[James Clark]

On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 13:06 +0600, Samisa Abeysinghe wrote:
> Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> >
> > I was looking at http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/c and there's just too 
> > many words there. Can we cut it down by about 75% and have a brief 
> > description?
> >
> > Sanjiva.
> I just gave the following. The rest has been added by Chatra.

I don't think this still needs a lot of work.  We need to focus on
providing as concisely as possible the information that a potential user
would need in order to decide whether WSF/C is of interest to them.

It's also important to strike the right tone. It should be factual and
technical and steer well clear of anything that sounds like
marketing-speak.

> Web Services Framework (WSF) for C

Wouldn't it make sense to consistently abbreviate Web Services Framework
for C as "WSF/C" rather than as WSF for C?

> WSO2 Web Services Framework (WSF) for C is a fully open source framework 
> for providing and consuming web services.

Does "fully" add anything?  That's marketing-speak not information.  The
relevant information is that we're open source licensed under the Apache
License 2.0.  We should deal with the open-source-ness in one place
rather than splitting it into two.

>  WSO2 WSF for C is a collection 
> of libraries and tools, supporting basic web services technologies such 
> as XML, SOAP, WSDL. REST as well as the Web Services specifications such 
> as WS-Addressing, MTOM, WS-Security and WS-Reliable Messaging. 

This is very wishy washy.  It would be more useful to have a bulleted
list of the key specifications (including versions) supported; we can
group related specifications to make it easier to understand.

Just saying we support XML is not helpful.

> It comes 
> with both HTTP and XMPP transport support.
> 
> WSO2 WSF for C is equipped with the wsclient tool that acts as a Web 
> Service client. wsclient can be given an XML payload as input, along 
> with the service endpoint and would output the the XML payload of the 
> received reply. Various options of wsclient allows the user to leverage 
> the full Web services stack, including WS-* specifications as well as 
> raw REST like invocations.

I think this far too long.  The information we need to convey is that we
have a tool that provides a command-line interface for consuming web
services.

> WSO2 WSF for C provides the basic framework on which other scripting 
> language bindings could be built; WSO2 WSF for PHP and WSO2 WSF for AJAX 
> are based on WSO2 WSF for C. It could also be embeded in other software 
> where the full Web services stack support is required.

The "could"s make it sound very vaporware-ish.  The stuff about WSF/PHP
and AJAX really belongs on those pages.  The rest ought to be obvious
from the description of the library aspect of WSF/C.

>  It is based on 
> Apache Axis2/C and also includes Apache Sandesha2/C.

Why is this in the same paragraph as stuff on scripting?

This doesn't really answer the key question which is likely to arise in
potential users mind, which is "why use WSF/C rather than Axis2/C?".

James