[jbosstools-dev] $0 subscription downloads - Stacks integration with download manager

[Rob Stryker]

Rafael (and others):

So I spent an hour or so yesterday chatting with David Hladky about the 
new download manager rest services which JBosstools intends to use to 
help us download EAP 6.x. It allows for a workflow that can help us get 
terms and conditions, verify credentials, verify agreements have been 
signed, and then provide a download utility with a temporary url that 
expires to download the EAP.

The api and the test server I played with look good so far. JBossTools, 
though, pulls all of its runtime information from jdf-stacks. We 
typically pull our download urls from there.

Currently in stacks, community editions have a "url" for the project 
page, and a "downloadUrl" for a link to a permanent url for the given 
runtime to download.

EAP instances in stacks.yaml only have a url for a project page. When 
the download manager written by David goes live, we'll need to consider 
what to do for stacks.yaml, and I'd prefer to get this stuff sorted now.

I'd like to suggest that we add a new attribute "downloadManagerUrl".  
This will ensure clients know that this is a workflow url and not a 
static url for downloading a file.

There's 2 parts to the rest service written by David. First is the rest 
service url itself, and the second is the file we're requesting. 
Currently a url for one part of the rest workflow (in this example, to 
get terms and conditions) looks like this:

${download-manager-server}/rest/tc?downloadURL=/content/origin/files/sha256/42/42a9766b4914af02350a39612eb587170e7bf079143cc70886c9cf33022b433c/jboss-eap-6.0.0.dv.ci-installer.jar

You can see the two parts are the rest service url (on test server, 
https://www-eng.jboss.org/download-manager/rest/tc)  and the second part 
is what we're requesting (in this case, 
/content/origin/files/sha256/42/42a9766b4914af02350a39612eb587170e7bf079143cc70886c9cf33022b433c/jboss-eap-6.0.0.dv.ci-installer.jar)

I see a few problems here. The first is that, in my opinion, those urls 
are pretty long to be including in stacks.yaml... but luckily the 
download-manager allows for shortened urls, so we could have the 
download-manager server respond to a url like 
${server-root}/rest/tc?downloadURL=jboss-eap-6.0.0.dv.ci-installer.jar. 
The download manager would then map the attribute to the 
/content/blah/blah/sha path and proceed accordingly. So this is easily 
fixed.


The second, is that the rest services do not point to the next url to 
request. For example, if I go to the tc-accepted rest service to see if 
the terms and conditions were accepted yet, it does not point me to the 
next url in the workflow. Because of this, there's really no single 
entry-point in the workflow, and each rest service url is kind of a 
standalone url.

With the second point in mind, we might just want our stacks.yaml 
attribute to say downloadManagerPath=jboss-eap-6.0.0.dv.ci-installer.jar.

The client (in this case jbosstools) would pass that string to the 
download manager rest service it chooses to use. The download-manager 
server would resolve jboss-eap-6.0.0.dv.ci-installer.jar to its more 
specific /content/sha256/23423823423/etc  path, and proceed normally.

One concern with this approach is that the stacks.yaml will never 
include the actual url of the rest service entry point. Even if we 
wanted to have stacks.yaml point to the entry point, there's no one 
entry-point since the rest services do not point to the next step in the 
workflow.

I personally have no problem using the service as it's written now, and 
with stacks.yaml only having a shortened path available, but I wanted to 
get your (and others) feedback on the situation before this gets pushed 
to production, after which we probably won't have much chance to change it.

Any thoughts?

- Rob Stryker