Tuesday, August 22, 2006

People Service Session at IOS

Apache's Ted Leung reports on the Vancouver IOS (I'm late, not him). He had the following to say on the session I led on the Liberty People Service.
When I saw Kaliya Hamlin at Gnomedex, she told me about the Liberty People Service. This is the kind of thing that would be very useful to integrate into Chandler, so I made sure to attend Paul Madsen's session on the People Service. The session was dominated by technical content as people tried to understand how the service actually worked. Despite being unfamiliar with most of the Liberty specs, I found that I had no trouble following the discussion. I spent a year or so doing some consulting on the WS-* web services stack, and that experience made it possible to follow along. I had also read the People Service whitepaper. which probably also helped. I was disappointed to hear that there are no implementations (other than private prototypes) of the People Service that someone could get a hold of and play with. In this day and age, I expect a spec to be accompanied by a reference implementation or something. Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong people.

Two comments:

1) I'm glad Ted got something useful out of the session - his criticism of the lack of an implementation is valid, hopefully the emerging Liberty Open Source initiative will address this.

2) I can't believe I looked this confused this early in the session - later sure but I've only drawn a single user at this point and I look stuck.

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