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Libre Service Engines are a key technological component of the Libre Services model. A service engine is a complete, fully integrated package of service features and capabilities, ready for deployment and delivery by a service provider. It is part of the definition of a Libre Service that such an engine exist, ready for deployment without requiring any further software integration work.
As described below, a starting-point set of reference service engines has been created. However these are far from being complete and mature enough for deployment as usable services.
The goal of this project is to create a complete and coherent set of service engines, ready for deployment as usable first-generation Libre Services.
First-generation Libre Service Engines are an essential requirement for the success of this initiative. This is a top-priority mission-critical project.
A schedule for this project has not yet been established.
This project is currently being financed by the Free Protocols Foundation.
The current project manager is Mohsen Banan.
Substantial architectural and engineering development work has already been invested in this project.
We have done the intellectual work to define the requirements for a coordinated set of services, allowing highly generalized interactions among each other. We have identified the key abstractions that must be represented within such a set, including such things as individual persons, businesses, physical locations, and events. We have then designed a family of services to represent these abstractions, and to allow rich and complex interactions among them. The result is a coherent and powerful model for generalized Internet services.
Based on this general conceptual architecture we have created an initial set of starting-point Libre Service Engines. These include service engines to provide the following functionality:
These are reference implementations only, not yet ready for deployment as usable services. They are available for examination, evaluation and reuse by the software engineering community, and provide a starting-point for collaborative engineering development.
In addition to bringing these service engines to maturity, it will be necessary to create service engines based on the other abstractions and usage models in our general conceptual architecture. These include services based on the generalized abstraction of business entities, physical locations, and events; services for publication of information; and services allowing complex interaction among the various types of abstracted entities.