Re: Meta-service doc/collection

[James M Snell <jasnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

For Connections 2.0, we're enabling the management of blog instances 
using atompub.  In our service document, there will be a separate 
workspace with a single collection, each member entry represents a blog 
owned by the authenticated user.

for instance,
  <entry>
    <id>...</id>
    <title>blog title</title>
    <content>blog description</content>
    <updated>...</updated>
    <author><name>james</name></author>
  </entry>

In the initial post, the id, updated and author elements are ignored. 
We replace those values with server generated values.

The title and content elements provide the name and short text 
description of the blog.

Once created, a new workspace is added to the service document.  each 
workspace represents one blog.  Each workspace/blog exposes several 
collections (entries, media, comments, etc).

There are a few additional things we do to manage access control and 
advanced blog settings but those aren't really important here.

- James

Tim Bray wrote:
> I'm turning back to mod_atom after ignoring it for a couple of months.  
> One of the problems is that you create a blog by adding a line to the 
> Apache config file.  One config-file line, one publication, nice and 
> simple.  This doesn't scale if you want to create/destroy pubs much at 
> all.  So I've been wondering how you'd go about allowing people to 
> create publications without screwing with config files.  The answer is 
> obvious: you have one service doc and collection, where the entries 
> represent the publications, with links to the service docs.  Then you 
> can create and delete publications and update their metadata via the 
> Atom Protocol with POST/PUT/DELETE to the "meta-service" doc and the 
> links in the "meta-collection" doc.
>
> Interesting question: to create a new publication, do you need to post 
> an Entry with <content type="application/atomsvc+xml">?  I don't think 
> so...
>
> Anyhow... is that all one needs to say?  Or are there some other things 
> to be worked out that might benefit from standardization?  I'll have a 
> more informed opinion after I finish implementing.
>
> It occurs to me that having a <link rel="meta-service" href="URI of 
> meta-service doc" /> might be nice.  But I don't need one so maybe YAGNI.
>
>   -Tim