Question about registry support of general RESTful services.

[Theresa Dower]

I ask because a colleague (Steve Handy) at STScI and I are looking for a way to catalogue our non-VO-standard services for internal use and wondering if the registry paradigm fits the services we already have and ones we're planning to build soon. He's suggested looking to WSDL 2.0 for answers on RESTful service descriptions if there's not already a VO way to do things. I'd like to start working on this once I've read through it and our use cases and the existent special-case VO interface descriptions, and welcome help, input, a hostile takeover, from anyone. Anybody? Bueller?

-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Plante [mailto:rplante at ncsa.uiuc.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 4:29 PM
To: Theresa Dower
Cc: registry at ivoa.net
Subject: Re: Question about registry support of general RESTful services.

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, Theresa Dower wrote:
> Is there anywhere in the IVOA standards docs that I've somehow missed for
> describing generic RESTful services? The ParamHTTP standard doesn’t quite
> fit for a lot of real-world cases. Beyond expanding queryTypes for ParamHTTP
> to include UPDATE/DELETE/ETC,  I also mean some kind of  support for
> parameters that are XML or JSON blobs.  

No, in general.  ParamHTTP represents a special though very common 
subset.  This was done to keep the description of the interface very 
simple and cover the 80%, including DAL service interfaces.  

> If not, I’m beginning to see
> the need for a general extension for it.

I agree.  I'd love to see a strawman floated for it.  

cheers,
Ray