Tuesday, December 25, 2007

A High Level Overview of SIF Services

The SIFA Infrastructure group is currently working on adding service-oriented messaging to SIF. This work is currently being labeled "SIF Services." It should not be confused with web services and the attendant set of WS-* standards. The Technical Board has had some recent discussions around what services ARE and ARE NOT. Following is a summary that I have put together that will hopefully bring additional clarity for all.

SIF Services will:
  • Be built on top of the SIF Infrastructure
  • Require a Zone Integration Server
  • Be based on message exchange integration patterns
SIF Services will not:
  • Be dependant on SOAP
  • Directly interoperate with SOAP-based web services
  • Be based on RPC integration patterns
SIF Infrastructure will:
  • Add support for SOAP as a transport
  • Be required for SIF Services
Building services on the existing SIF Infrastructure has many advantages. However, there are many business and use cases that have been put forward by the community that are not necessarily well addressed only by the current SIF Services proposal. Following are the main areas of functionality that need further discussion:
  • Teaching and learning
    • Exchange of large data payloads (e.g. multimedia, SCORM SCO's)
  • General interoperability
    • Point-to-point interoperability between applications
    • Expanding interoperability to new applications/vendors, especially those that are not "native" to K12
More discussion will take place at the SIFA Annual meeting in Washington, D.C. in January and in planned discussions about "services" within SIF.