GS1 Resolver @ id.gs1.org - upgrading!

[Nick Lansley]

Dear all

I can't believe it's been two years since GS1 Resolver first went on-air!

Between that day and this, we've utilised a process of prototyping and rapid application development to build out the service's capabilities with each new use-case that has landed at our door. However, these layers of evolved functionality have necessarily produced a morass of program code that had become complex and challenging to support.

So, for these first weeks of 2020, the entire Resolver has been re-written from scratch with the purpose of creating a secure, supportable, and performant production implementation that meets all the challenges of all our use-cases. The design and architecture have been simplified, the performance improved, and the data entry service made more closely compatible with the GS1 Global Registry Platform APIs. We've even changed programming languages from PHP to JavaScript/Node and Java to speed throughput and make every line of code earn its place so that we can enjoy the high performance at the lowest possible cloud computing costs.

One outcome for you is that the way you enter data into GS1 Resolver is also changing: Instead of an HTML / Javascript interactive client application, this will soon be replaced by a much simpler spreadsheet upload of data using a simple 'authorisation' key - and this will, in the coming months, be switched out to use the Global Registry Platform authentication keys instead.

All this work is designed to ensure that GS1 Resolver becomes a natural part of the GS1 Global Registry Platform but is also good news if you use the GS1 Resolver Community Edition. The same code-base (including authentication) will be applied to CE, too. All that "production quality" will be available to you; it also means that you can switch out the authentication module and replace it with your own if you wish; no more maintaining separate accounts for your end-users.

Time-scales? I'm hoping to complete the dev and some of the testing work this week (ending 28th February). If that happens, next week I will be getting the new service on-air at id.gs1.org, which may come with some slight disruption but I'll aim to minimise it as much as possible (and will aim for a 'you won't notice!" upgrade). 

After that, it's a case of ensuring the new code-base is stable and performant. I can be reasonably sure that it's in a good place already - much of the new code-base at id.gs1.org is already live! It's the new code to support data.gs1.org (that is, data entry) that is still under development at the moment.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Certainly, let Phil and myself know if you are planning a demo day soon and would rather we didn't change everything just before you present.

I better get back to coding then:

10 PRINT "New Resolver is coming!"

20 GOTO 10

Cheers

Nick