...
The initial focus of our work is on improving the tools for design of services. The other half of the process, deploying those services, could be a focus for upcoming work. XOpera has already been mentioned as an orchestration/deployment tool. Even XOpera will probably require some work to integrate our changes, or at the very least testing and verification. We would also like to make our approach as agnostic as possible, supporting multiple tools, possibly through a plugin framework, and even potentially more than one orchestration tool in the same service. Service deployment and management has seen more work in the open source community than service design, so there are many potential tools to choose from.
Our next steps should include selecting one or more orchestration tools to integrate our extensions with, and determining the scope of the development effort required.
Usability Improvements
In our investigation of Eclipse Winery we have encountered several areas where there are potential usability improvements that could be made. Some examples include:
- improving search and filtering of node and service template lists
- improving the UX for connecting nodes with relationships (e.g. visually identifying which nodes could satisfy a given requirement)
- improving the clarity of the connection between input and output parameters of service templates, nodes, and node types
We should evaluate these improvements for inclusion in our next development phase, or even in the current phase if extra resources are available.
Component Connection UX
One area that makes both component and service design complex is understanding the connections between nodes and/or components (the requirements, capabilities, and relationships, in TOSCA terminology). In the mid-to-long term we would like to make setting up these connections easier to understand and possibly automate (or at least automatically suggest) connectivity between components during the service design process. A first step in this direction might be to make it possible to document connection points and refer to that documentation within the tools. It should be possible eventually for Eclipse Winery to perform automatic discovery of compatible interfaces, search for components (or nodes, or node types) that satisfy requirements (or might require a component's capabilities), and offer up selections of components and relationship types when necessary.
Because of the scope of this topic, it will probably need to be broken down into several phases. In the next step of development we should evaluate what parts will fit within the limits of available time and resources, and estimate a timeline for implementing them.