getCapabilities() for standard services

[Guy Rixon]

On 26 Apr 2007, at 23:57, Doug Tody wrote:

>
> For these reasons I tend to see this information being entered
> and maintained as part of service development.  Just entering this
> information once, manually, in a registry form is not sufficient.
> Ultimately, if service developers use standard service frameworks to
> develop their services, it may be possible to automate and simplify
> this process even further.
>

For the list record, I'd like to point out that AstroGrid software  
has been doing
it this way since the beginning. It works very well. We find two  
problems with
this approach which we're moving to fix.

First, we didn't provide sufficient friendly tools for entering the  
metadata during
deployment. Some of the AG components have useable configuration tools,
but there are places where the deployer has to edit XML files by  
hand. The
tools were always intended but haven't been completed yet.

Secondly, we set up our server components to push their registration
documents into the publishing registries, using a SOAP operation
on the registry interface. This works and is simple ... until one  
needs to
control write access to the registry when it gets complicated.  
Essentially,
either the push needs carries publisher credentials (tedious to set up)
or the publishing registry is unprotected (undesirable). We now prefer
to reverse the process so that the registry pulls from the registrant.
Access control to the registry is then by a password given by the
registrar to its web-browser interface, which is much easier to set
up and manage. We expect to use the VOSI interface to pull the
registration.