netzooid

There have been several calls for an open repository API based on AtomPub over the past few months, starting with Anne Thomas Mannes and the latest being Glen Daniels’.

I think now is probably the time. From a personal point of view, I’ve been holding off until we got Galaxy 1.0 out the door so we could learn more about how it should be done and the scope of it.

This is all of course my own personal opinion at this point and is likely to change, but I outline it here so other people can have an idea of what I’m thinking.

Scope

• Should be built on AtomPub
• Define a way to deal with hierachical collections of versioned resources. That is, we need a standard way to model folders and files in AtomPub. This would be of benefit to a lot of people.
• Define a standard way to query for resources. I’m not sure how much specifying will need to be done here, it should be based on OpenSearch and AtomPub. A good use case is being able to search for a WSDL from an IDE and generate a client for it. Another use case might be to be able to download an application (= set of resources) using a query and start it.
• This may not need to be a spec like AtomPub is a spec. Since we will be using a lot of standard tools, this may be as simple as saying “yes we’re ALL using these things (AtomPub, OpenSearch, etc) in the same manner and here’s how the big picture comes together”

Not in scope

Or at least a separate optional specification:

• Dealing with metadata about artifacts (although I’m tempted to roll this into the above)
• Lifecycle management
• Dependency management

Participants

Besides WSO2 who I’ve talked with about this before, I would think the following open source projects may be interested as well:

• JBoss Drools BRMS team
• Sonatype’s Nexus team - they’ve expressed interest in having an AtomPub API to browse their repository/metadata
• IDE developers (NetBeans, Eclipse) - we definitely could use some IDE plugins.
• Anyone else who wants to have a say

Next Steps

We should probably set up a mailing list and wiki. Maybe at the Codehaus? We can then figure out where this thing goes from there.

I’m happy to announce that Mule Galaxy 1.0 is out!

The Mule Galaxy team is pleased to announce the availability of the 1.0 final release. Mule Galaxy is an open source governance platform with an integrated registry/repository. It includes versioning, lifecycle management, dependency management and policy enforcement features which enable you to effectively govern your applications and services. Support for a wide range of products is included, including support for Mule, Apache CXF, Spring and Maven. Custom integration may also be written via Galaxy’s simple Atom Publishing Protocol HTTP API.

Enterprise Version

You may also notice that we now have an enterprise version*. There are some features which may or may not be interesting to you:

• Out of the box clustering support. We’ve built some tools to make it easy to set up Galaxy in a cluster.
• Free text search with support for MS Office documents. We developed this feature for a customer who writes their service documentation in Word documents. They wanted the ability to associate the docs with services/applications so people could easily find services and figure out how to use them.
• Easy to UIs for defining new artifact types and indexes. (This can be done in community as well, but it requires you doing it with an XML descriptor)

* Some people may want you to think that because we have a commercial version that we are not committed to open source and are truly evil. Yes, we do need to make some money and cannot give away everything for free. I don’t think this is evil though. We develop Galaxy Community in the open. And certain features will probably migrate to the open source version as we move along. If you have feedback on what we should be doing, please drop us a line as we’re happy to listen.

How are you using Reg/Reps?

As we move into planning our next releases, we’d definitely like to hear how you’re using Galaxy (or any one of our competitor’s products). If you have features which you find useful or features which you really need, we’d like to know.

I’m happy to announce the availability of the Galaxy 1.0-beta-2 release. Galaxy is our open source governance platform which is just a fancy of way of saying, its an open source registry/repository. There are some cool new features in this release….

Mule NetBoot

You can now boot a Mule instance directly from the repository. You simply upload a Mule distribution to the repository and then use Mule NetBoot to boot this instance over the network. This can greatly simplify deployments.

Maven Publish Plugin

The Maven Publish Plugin allows you to easily push resources and artifacts from your build to the repository as part of the release cycle. You can publish individual resources, your project’s jar, and/or your project’s dependencies. This works great with Mule NetBoot…

XML Schema Support

We now index XML schemas. Which allows you to do things like this.

Improved AtomPub API

The number of things you can do with the AtomPub API has been greatly expanded. It features a much improved URI space which allows you to do a number of things you couldn’t do before:

• List individual workspaces easily (No more GQL needed)
• List child workspaces
• Add/delete workspaces
• Edit artifact metadata
• Edit artifact lifecycle information

Feedback

Your comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc are all very welcome. Please sign up for the mailing list and let us know what you think!