[DotGNU]More standards to look at

[Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)]

As some of you know I am the leader of the phpGroupWare and the GNU
Groupware Standards Project (previously known as OGS). I have been
keeping pretty quiet on this list while I work on making groupware web
services a reality instead of doing much talking about them.
I know its very important to get concensus but after months of "talking"
when starting the OGS project I have felt it better to get working code
in place with those that are serious about coding, and then go back and
adjust things as nessesary. Well we now have phpGroupWare broken into
well organized little pieces and all designed in a multi-tier fashion.
The primary interface that we use right now is the html interface, but
by using our common broker for executing methods, we have our xml-rpc
interface working and the soap interface partially works (got some bugs
to work out).
So now its very possible to create some java client, or even some VB
client that talks xml-rpc and use the phpGroupWare server simliar to
what Microsoft is doing with Exchange .NET

Our authentication system is quite modular so I plan to build one that
will work with the DotGNU authentication system that gets developed. One
of my other concerns is a universal preferences system for these users.
One that looks interesting is ACAP -- Application Configuration Access
Protocol, RFC #2244
http://www.imc.org/rfc2244

Right now we have our own preferences system, as many others seem to do.
I think this will be a critcal piece that we should get standardized on
and fast. This will be important to an overall solution for webservices
that are being built, and even WOS based solutions can make use of this.
In fact this will be of great importance to WOS based solutions, because
when the WOS app loads up it can get the users auth password and can
validate the user as well as go out and get that users preferences such
as localization details, area code, email address, and possibly things
like prefered font size and crap like that. So not only would we need to
decide on a standard, it will be important and helpful to decide on
several standard field names to work with. LDAP may lend itself to this
and LDAP may also be a good database for both auth and preferences. The
important thing will be to build XML based solutions (XML-RPC and SOAP)
for getting and saving this information.

I did a search and found an xml-ized version (DTD) of that
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/draft-melnikov-acap-xml-00.txt

Some more good info about ACAP can be found in its white paper.
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/acap/white-papers/acap-white-paper.html

This looks like a decent standard for storing preferences in a format
that can be shared between apps and services.
The main problem is that the standard is focused on solving mail
preference solutions, but there is no reason why this couldnt be used or
adapted to other solutions.

Seek3r