Once upon a time this would have been met with uproar and furious mail list posting, bad blood, and cries for all-just-getting-along. Now we just post quips. Even Anne-Thomas Manes seems done with WS-*. And Thoughtworks are down with the web 'as-is' architecture as well. Martin Fowler should work a few RESTy neologisms around the "Published v Public" paper which is essential reading into understanding why major.minor.patch versioning schemes don't travel to the Web (a new signature book wouldn't hurt either).
" * Should be built on AtomPub * Define a way to deal with hierachical collections of versioned resources. That is, we need a standard way to model folders and files in AtomPub. This would be of benefit to a lot of people. * Define a standard way to query for resources. I'm not sure how much specifying will need to be done here, it should be based on OpenSearch and AtomPub. A good use case is being able to search for a WSDL from an IDE and generate a client for it. Another use case might be to be able to download an application (= set of resources) using a query and start it. * This may not need to be a spec like AtomPub is a spec. Since we will be using a lot of standard tools, this may be as simple as saying 'yes we're ALL using these things (AtomPub, OpenSearch, etc) in the same manner and here's how the big picture comes together'"
Hierarchies come up a lot with Atom. But it's not clear to me this would need to be able to represent folders; I think parameter queries or tags would do just as well. Each artifact will have a URI and it's likely that URI will have a consistent internal structure that the server can dispatch on; what's needed is a way to ask for that structure without coupling the clients. IOW if the metadata requires container or subsumption semantics, maybe it's easier to rework the semantics. At a different layer but with passing similarities - can I suggest that OSGi and Maven port their jar/bundle metadata to Atom?
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