Today, Bob and I worked out the architecture for the new attribute server. The server itself will be on the protected anno-3 machine, and the control panel that allows you to define and delete attribute keys will be available only on that machine. Access to attributes (which includes inserting, deleting, and retrieving) will be performed using XML RPC. XML RPC allows a PERL object to appear as a normal object even though it is running on a remote server. Initially, the RPC interface will be providing just the minimal set of methods necessary to implement attributes; but this same scheme with a larger set of methods could allow us to put multiple full-function ERDB databases on remote servers with very little coding effort.
Initially, the new attribute methods will be implemented as replacements for the current methods in FIG.pm. There will be two diminutions of functionality: we can no longer search on URLs, and there is no provision for controlled-vocabulary attributes. Hopefully, this will not be a big problem.
A list of the methods being implemented is given below the fold.
Methods in CustomAttributes that will be implemented on the attributes server.
Methods in ERDB that will be implemented on the attributes server.
Methods that will be replaced in FIG.
- get_attributes
- add_attribute
- change_attribute
- delete_attribute
Methods that will be deleted from FIG.
- get_cv_attributes
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