Overview

One component currently being worked on in the S-RAMP project is a Maven Repository Facade on top of the S-RAMP repository.  The reasons for doing this include:

• Provides the ability to easily browse the S-RAMP repository in a familiar way using standard Maven repo tools (not so important)
• Enables developers to directly add S-RAMP artifacts as dependencies in their Maven projects (interesting!)

The Problem

The S-RAMP specification and the Maven Repository format have some things in common, and I'm confident that a mapping between the two can be done in a sensible way.  The problem is how do we map the Maven Repo concepts (groupId, artifactId, version, type, classifier, etc) to the S-RAMP artifact concepts (artifact model, artifact type, uuid, etc)?

Strawman Solution

I have started writing the code for the Maven Repository Facade in the S-RAMP project using a relatively straightforward (naive?) mapping between these two systems.  Here are the details:

So for example, I might upload my XML Schema (XSD) to S-RAMP.  The result will be a new XsdDocument with a UUID of 4c0bee48-54f6-4b44-aeb3-86f8c91dde12 added to S-RAMP.  As a Java developer I can add a dependency to my Maven project with the following markup:

<dependency>
    <groupId>xsd.XsdDocument</groupId>
    <artifactId>4c0bee48-54f6-4b44-aeb3-86f8c91dde12</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <type>xsd</type>
</dependency>

This approach is workable (my current implementation does exactly this) but not ideal.  The groupId and artifactId, for example, are not easily known.  This problem can be mitigated with tooling, obviously.

I'm interested in suggestions for how to better map the S-RAMP space onto the Maven space.