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Discovery by Browsing

Marc Dutoo edited this page Dec 5, 2013 · 8 revisions

Goal

The goal is to help business users find and tag services that are interesting to them, by simply letting them browse the place they know best, where such services are most likely to be : their usual business applications and intranet.

How it works

It takes the form of a 'browser in the browser'. It automatically finds WSDL files while the user navigates, extracts business information about it such as the business application where it was found (taken from the title of the browsed page), then makes him check all of it before sending the files to the Nuxeo repository.

Here's another example using the linked CheBi sample :

If you need to use your company's proxy to access the web, replace it by the EasySOA DBB Proxy in your web browser, but configure it in the EasySOA DBB Proxy's in js/settings.js :

// to enable forward proxying to your company's proxy, uncomment and adapt :
exports.FORWARD_PROXY_HOST = 'myCompanyProxy.com'
exports.FORWARD_PROXY_PORT = 80

If your company's proxy uses Proxy Auto Configuration URL & file (.pac), download it and open it (it's mere Javascript) to know which are the actual company proxy host & port forwarded to, and configure them in js/settings.js as said above.

Limitations

  • For now, the parser mainly looks for links whose URL ends with "wsdl", but we consider supporting several other ways to find services (from trying common URL patterns of services frameworks -"/cxf", etc. -, to custom scripts or application-specific URL patterns).
  • Secured websites (HTTPS) can't be browsed.

Note: In order to see uploaded WSDLs in Nuxeo, you may need to refresh your workspace (look for a small "refresh" icon on the page)

Bookmarklet

In order to allow to explore secured environments, the discovery by browsing tool is also available in the form of a bookmarklet. In order to install it, just drag the link from the DBB welcome page to your favorites:

You can then start to use it by browsing to any page of interest, then clicking on the "Find WSDLs" bookmark. You'll need to launch the bookmarklet on each page you want EasySOA to explore.

Limitations

  • This tool allows for EasySOA to be aware of the existence of services at a given URL, but if accessing its WSDL requires authentication, the registry won't be able to download and parse it. Note: in order to resolve this issue, we could set up a way for EasySOA to use credentials for given sites. It could be done either by asking the user to provide his own credentials (so that EasySOA can use them temporarily), or by the configuration of permanent rights to EasySOA by the information system administrators.
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