OSLC Workshop: Sharing our Software Engineering artifacts (Part 1)

I will start with a cycle of posts related to the OSLC world, a new way to share information between different tools and programs that help us with the software develoment cycle.

I will talk more about OSLC in the near future. But if you want to learn more about OSLC, I can recommend the two entries:

1. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Lyo (The SDK to implement OSLC compatible systems)
2. http://open-services.net/ (The main page)

I have started with the Bugzilla workshop, a step by step (sometimes it just does not look like a Workshop but like a guide to learn what the pieces of code do). You can download the code following the guide in http://wiki.eclipse.org/Lyo/OSLCWorkshop.

The workshop helps us to extend a Bugzilla server functionality, so it will share the bugs, tickets, change requests, or however you want to call it, for OSLC the name of this type of resource is change request.

Service Provider Catalog

In the first lab, they call it Lab 1, where we learn what is a Service Provider Catalog, this is the first piece that we need to implement to enable a tool to share its information to OSLC consumers.
In few words, it contains links to the Service Providers and some information about the tool.

Service Provider

The service provider is a piece of information that you and your team must need to decide how to separate the pieces that your tool, in this case Bugzilla, separates its component.  Bugzilla uses Products, Rational Team Concert uses Projects, etc. You can choose the way to share the different pieces of information.

A Service Provider document indicates the way to communicate with the different pieces. With links it indicates what are the requirements to create new resources, how to query them among other things.

In this workshop, the  Service Providers map to Bugzilla Products. In order to add a Service Provider to the Catalog, we create one with the code :


BugzillaServiceProviderFactory.createServiceProvider(basePath, product, parameterMap);

where 
basePath is the URL of the application, 
product is a String with the value of the product in Bugzilla
parameterMap is a Map containing the productId and its value

And we register the new Service Provider in the catalog with:

registerServiceProvider(basePath,bugzillaServiceProvider,productId);


More to come in the second part of the workshop.

References:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Lyo/OSLCWorkshop