The OSLC open source community is pleased to announce the creation of the OSLC4Net project at Microsoft Codeplex. This project was created with a goal of providing SDKs and sample implementations to assist developers with the creation of OSLC providers and consumers in .NET development and runtime environments. The project currently contains the initial contribution of a .NET SDK also called OSLC4Net - it is written in C# and is based on the same concepts used in OSLC4J in the Lyo project. Developers model their OSLC resources as .NET objects, annotate them with OSLC attributes and use the REST services provided by ASP.NET MVC 4 for HTTP requests and request handling. Please visit the project for more information.
The project includes an OSLC Change Management consumer implementation in the form of a test suite. A sample provider implementation is one of the top project goals for the near term. The project contains an issue tracker and discussion forums along with the source code and a zip of the current binaries for anyone interested in getting started.
Answers to some questions you might have:
Why Codeplex? Why not put this in Eclipse Lyo?
Eclipse Lyo is the home for open source tools for OSLC. While much of Lyo is written in Java, one of the goals of the project is to provide OSLC tools for other languages such as Python or JavaScript. The recently added Perl libraries are one step in that direction, and OSLC4Net is the next.
Although we initially wanted to contribute the .NET content to Lyo on Eclipse, two factors influenced creating OSLC4Net: First, the licenses for OSLC4Net and its dependencies such as ASP.NET are a natural fit for Codeplex. But more important is the natural affinity .NET developers have for using Codeplex for .NET open source. Just as Java developers look to Eclipse or Apache, .NET developers find much of their open source on Codeplex.
What licenses apply to OSLC4Net?
The source code being developed by the OSLC4Net project uses the Eclipse Public License V1. The dependencies for OSLC4Net use the MIT license (dotNetRdf and JSON.NET), Microsoft Public License (HTML Agility Pack) and Apache V2 License (ASP.NET MVC 4, Log4Net).
How can I contribute to OSLC4Net?
The project is looking for contributors - see the Codeplex FAQ for everything you need to know about joining Codeplex and contributing to a project.
What does this mean for Eclipse Lyo?
Absolutely nothing - Lyo will continue providing OSLC SDKs, open source libraries, test suites and code samples for technologies other than .NET. We are preparing a 1.1 release of Lyo which includes OSLC4J enhancements such as new OSLC query and client libraries plus some new libraries to assist with development of OAuth providers. It remains the
Stay tuned to the lyo-dev mailing list for more information.
I hope you will all check out the project - happy OSLC .NET hacking!