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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

  1. High Availability
    Users of traditional web applications often have the expectation that service will be available anytime.  In order to provide this level of functionality, the underlying web services must be available 24 x 7.  To that end, more work is required to understand what MIT services need to be highly available, and how the services they rely on must be updated to meet this demand.
  2. Clarify Support
    In order to provide a highly available service, the support procedure must be expanded to provide 24 x 7 response.  In particular, an escalation path must be clearly defined in order to assure continues support.
  3. 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 application that deal with known data delays.
  4. Versioning
    In order to provided a reliable and stable interface to developers, a versioning methodology should be agreed upon and utilized through the project.  Developers are encourage to learn from the versioning work currently be done on other projects, include Kuali Student and Kuali RICE.  Also, IS&T must be ready to support any released versions for the foreseeable future as applications tend to remain static one deployed.
  5. 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 guide were future development work.
  6. IS&T Standards
    IS&T should develop a convention around web-services and development for IS&T services.  Even with such a standard in place, services would still need to go through the TAP review process before going into production.

3. Recommendation from the TAP Consultation

DRAFT

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