Date: Jan. 29, 2008
People: Craig Counterman, Mike Moretti, Qing Dong
Purpose: Qing wants to understand the purpose of the proposed REST api and how it fits into the overal stellar architecture
1. Why Stellar needs to use a ECM service now?
The current stellar content structure was based on designs in 2000 when we don't know anything about ECM beyond database and filesystem. It works, but very fragile and not scalable. Also Stellar wants to move to a more standard ECM architecture within IS&T.
2. The current Stellar architecture:
Single DB base server running Oracle
Single stellar web server hosts different tools. The tools are very different. Some use structs, some use spring MVC, and some use an inhouse implementation. Tools all use a common service api to access the database. Older tools use OKAPI objects and newer ones use hibernate.
3. What Alfresco API to use:
Stellar wants to use a remote Alfresco api so the repository is more distributed and scalable. Ideally this API should be implemented on JSR170 and JSR283. However, the alfresco JSR 170 api is in process, and JSR-RMI extension doesn't work (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AR-706
). So that leaves us with either the Web services API and the web script.
Web Services API: fasted and most portable remoting interface. Qing has lots experience with it implementing Thalia's REST api with it. problem: Alfresco specific. not JSR 170 compliant.
Web script API: