Project thought: PHP SCA Integration into Apache Tuscany

[Graham Charters]

Hi All,

I'm not sure whether this is the appropriate place for this post. I
missed the deadline for the Apache proposals, but perhaps there's a
student out there who'd be interested in putting this forward and
working on it. My apologies if posting here is not the right place,
or an appropriate approach.

I contribute to an open source PHP PECL project providing a PHP
implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) programming
model (see http://pecl.php.net/package/SCA_SDO). SCA is a programming
model which allows you to assemble applications using a Service-
Oriented Architecture style. This includes producing and consuming
Web services of various types, including soap/http, json-rpc, REST,
Atom.

I've recently started looking into the Tuscany Apache Incubator
project (see http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany/ ), which provides a
Java-based implementation of SCA. This runtime is extensible for
different implementation types, and currently supports things like
BPEL, OSGi, Java (POJOs), Spring, JavaScript and XQuery.

I think it would make a very interesting and challenging project to
extend Apache Tuscany to supports the concept of a PHP implementation
type. This implementation type would be used to include PHP SCA
enabled applications in an assembly which might also include any of
the other Apache Tuscany implementation types. A realistic scenario
for this solution might be a PHP Web front end to a Java business
application. Tuscany includes a Java "store" application which could
be converted to demonstrate the final deliverables. The solution
would also require extensions to the PHP SCA project to enable
existing PHP SCA service configuration to be externally overridden by
Tuscany. The major work items would be as follows:

1. Extend PHP SCA to support external configuration of services (PHP
Scripting skills).
2. Extend Apache Tuscany to provide a PHP implementation type (Java
and XML/XML Schema skills).
3. Extend Apache Tuscany to support PHP SCA as a deployment target
(Java skills).

I'm not an Apache committer, so don't believe I can mentor the
project, but I think the Apache Tuscany folks might be interested in
stepping up to this. I'd be more than happy to help with the PHP PECL
side of things and provide technical advice on how to approach the
problem, as well as reviewing/testing code.

Any thoughts, comments, would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Graham.

[Ryan Pavlik]

Graham Charters wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm not sure whether this is the appropriate place for this post. I
> missed the deadline for the Apache proposals, but perhaps there's a
> student out there who'd be interested in putting this forward and
> working on it. My apologies if posting here is not the right place,
> or an appropriate approach.
>
>

If you are applying as a student, the deadline has been extend to April
7. Go and apply!

Ryan

--
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com

#282 + (442) - [X]
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

[Graham Charters]

Sadly, I'm not a student. My student days ended over a decade ago :-S

My hope was this project idea might capture a student's imagination
enough for them to propose it or something similar. If I were a
student, I'd love to work on it :-D

[David Anderson]

Do you have developer-level knowledge of the software you are pimping
to students? If so, maybe talk to the ASF about becoming a mentor for
them, and add your proposal to their ideas page. Dunno if it'd
interest them, but it's certainly worth a try. And you'd get a tshirt
for your troubles if you and up mentoring a student! :-)

- Dave

[lresende]

Hey Graham

This looks like a very good proposal, Hoping it's still OK, I'll
add this together with the other Tuscany proposals and hope you get
attention (and applications) from the students.

Thanks
Luciano Resende

[Graham Charters]

Hi Luciano, thanks, that's great news! I'll keep an eye on the Apache
proposals and hope somebody bites.

Regards, Graham.