Hey... wait a minute! the SharPA is coming!

We've just registered our project: that's why we have this ugly homepage! While we work on our masterpiece, please go to the sourceforge SharPA project page

However, we produced our very first piece of documentation, and we proudly show it here:

Preliminary documentation

Subject to change

SharPA

Overview - Introduction to the project.

By pomarc

v. 0.1

1 What is the SharPA Project?

Web Services. Every developer who writes or uses web services loves and hates them. Loves them because of their power, hates them because they’re… well… remote.

WSDL helps us discover the interfaces we need to operate a WS, but as soon as we’ve parsed the WSDL file, we need some way to interact with that WS: we need a way to easily, quickly and consistently call those funky methods, get and examine responses and faults.

We usually have to browse our IDE’s class browser to see the classes exposed by the WS, and then write down some code to test the methods. A new method to test, some new code to write to initialize scalar parameters, response and objects params and so on.

SharPA comes into the game. The SharPA project aims to develop an application and an infrastructure which can automate and simplify the task of testing web services.

2 Which kind of application will it be?

            SharPA will be both a framework AND an application. All the inner workings of the program will be contained in separate assemblies, that could be reused in other applications. Ideally the SharPA winforms application will be just one of these apps.

At this stage of the planning, the application structure is imagined with at least these “zones”:

• A choosing pane, where the user can choose the Web Service to analyze
• A list of the available Methods for the selected WS
• Some form of input to specify the method parameters and to invoke the method itself
• An output zone, where it will be possible to examine the output of the method invocation, in a few different ways (e.g.: simple SOAP dump, a tree, a list, a grid ecc.)
• Some property panes
• Buttons, gizmos, flash, smoke, mirrors.

Note that this planning is in a  very early stage.

The application will be based on “Projects”, and hopefully the users will manage different projects at once.

Some advanced features could be envisioned, for example:

• Possibility of automated code generation to use the WS or to build a standalone testing application
• Possibility of chaining (orchestrate) web services
• Possibility of stress-test WS, with or without performance monitoring, with or without random input generation

The rest is left to your imagination.

3 Extensibility anyone?

            The SharPA Project is all about extensibility. It will have a carefully designed plug-in framework, in order to provide users an easy way to extend the application’s features. For example, consider the different ways to see the output of a web method call. A plugin could show the ouputs in a datagrid, another in a graph form, another one as a class tree.

4 What does the word “SharPA” stand for?

            Of  course it’s not the word sherpa misspelled. It’s  a loose contraption for  C Sharp  WS Power Analyzer. Ok, ok: There’s no C and no WS…anyway it sounded good, and that’s the name. full stop.

5 Where is the cool “SharPA Project” logo?

            Well I am no good at graphic design. If I design the logo, it will probably be horrible (unwatchable, as a friend uses to say). So, the logo will come when someone good enough  will provide it. Thanks.

6 Will you do it ALONE? Yes, sure.  WHEN?

            I need this thing for my own job. So I’ll try to do it. Anyway, I will appreciate and use other developers contributes if this will help the project to grow up better and faster. Having a small group of developer working on the project could be very fun, and it would surely improve the produced stuff. And then, just think about all the fun we could have reviewing the project eating tasty meals and good wines!