Metadata aware Connector API
jdoyle Jul 8, 2009 12:10 PMI would like to hear some more of the thoughts around what the connector metadata API might look like (https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/TEIID-685).
Here's some snips from an email thread JPAV and I had just to seed this conversation:
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On Jun 24, 2009, at 10:34 AM, John Doyle wrote:
> Hey John,
>
> Don't know if you've seen the thread/Jira, but the Teiid team is
> going to expose a metadata creation API to the connectors in 6.2. I
> would like to push this towards a relational metadata API that could
> have multiple implementations and be the only API for Teiid
> relational metadata creation.
>
> It seems to me that we already have this API spread across several
> plug-ins in designer, and that API could be modified to be the
> eclipse-free metadata API that I envision.
>
> Do you have any thoughts on this?
>
> Can you tell me what plug-ins you think make up the existing API?
> Obviouly c.m.metamodels.relational and
> c.m.metamodels.transformation, are there others?
>
> ~john
John,
Jacobs, Hawkins, Ramesh, and I had a conversation about this a couple
of weeks ago. I believe the metadata API available to the connectors
currently is via MetadataRecords. The plan that Hawkins has is to
take the 5 different metadata APIs and the respective implementations
used by the server (that's right, 5...) and collapse them all into
one. The API they're focusing on is already both Eclipse- and EMF-
free. So, since it doesn't include EMF, that means the
metamodels.relational and metamodels.transformation plug-ins you
mention will *not* be part of that API. There are no plans to change
the current Designer to remove either its dependency on EMF or VDB
indexes, so there will be a compatibility layer in the server for a
while to handle this. Once we have new tooling that deals with the
new metadata API and (expected) SQL/MED representational format, we
can finally cut the cord. Hawkins should be able to give you a
detailed roadmap and schedule regarding the consolidation of metadata
APIs and what the final API will look like.
Thanks,
JPAV
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Can I get some more detail on the plan? If there is an internal representation that's going to be exposed as an API, and you point me to it so I can take a look? I want to look at it with a view to standardizing all of the metadata I create across importer and connectors in future releases.
~jd