It has been a tiresome week for me. I worked on the BSP (Basic Security Profile) 1.0
Validation Handler, which I am doing for
GSoC 2008. Over the past few weeks I went through the pain of understanding two specifications, namely
WS-Security 1.0 and
BSP 1.0 .:( Finally I managed to get an overall picture of them. :) . While doing this project, the main difficulties that I came across were
- The lack of documentation of Open Source projects.
- Even though there are some documentation and code samples, some important points are left out of the documentation process. Mostly the programmer who did the project, is the one who is doing the documentation as well. Sometimes he may miss out some key factors. This is not done on purpose but it is attributed to human error. :)
- Therefore the people who use those software should adopt the trial and error method, to find out those points which were missed in the documenting process.
Though I had the above problems, I had the self-satisfaction that when I finish this project people will use it (Free of Charge) and I will be part of a good deed. Of course that's the whole point of
FOSS. :) The other point to note here was the roles played by the various open source communities in promoting FOSS [including google $$$ :) $$$]. I would like to thank the Apache
Rampart, Apache
Axis2, Apache
AXIOM communities for being very supportive. Plus I would like to thank all the guys who wrote articles, tutorials about those open source projects which made my life easier. I must thank my mentor,
Nandana as well. He was good enough to allocate some time for me, out of his busy schedule. He really helped me to jump across obstacles which came up while doing the development.
Ah forgot to mention some other thing. I will blog those things which I had to learn through trial and error, so you guys could benefit from it. I will blog about those things when I get a free time. :)
