1. Background
Over the past 2½ years, ISDA has developed a set of web services that interact with MIT ID, Moira, Roles, Data Warehouse and GEONAMES.ORG in an effort to provide developers/development teams at MIT an easy to use and a reusable interface into these systems. The initial developmental phase of ISDA web services has been completed and work has begun on the second phase which includes creating a standing Web Services Work Group and providing expertise and documentation to developers.
2. Findings
- High Availability
Users of traditional web applications often have the expectation that services will be available anytime. In order to provide this level of functionality, the underlying web services should be available 24 x 7. To that end, more work is required to understand what web services need to be highly available, and what updates they may require to meet this demand.
- Clarify Support
In order to provide a highly available service, the support procedure should be expanded to provide 24 x 7 response. In particular, an escalation path should be clearly defined in order to assure around the clock support.
- Data Latency
Any data latency issues due to source downtime or caching should be thoroughly documented. This will give developers a fuller understanding of the data they are using and allow them to create applications that deal with possible data delays.
- Versioning
In order to provided a reliable and stable interface to developers, a versioning methodology should be agreed upon and utilized. Developers are encouraged to learn from the versioning work currently being done on other projects, including Kuali Student and Kuali RICE. Also, IS&T must commit to supporting any released versions for the foreseeable future as applications tend to remain active for many years once deployed.
- Statistics and Reporting
The current method of gathering statistics should be reviewed and updated to allow for better and more robust reporting. This will allow for a better understanding of how current services are used and offer guidance where future development work may be needed.
- IS&T Standards
IS&T should develop a convention around web-services and development for IS&T web services. Even with such a standard in place, services would still need to go through the TAP process before going into production.
3. Recommendation from the TAP Consultation
"Approved with Concerns":
A majority of TAP approves the plan as long as it takes into account the concerns described in the Findings.