Interceptor architecture?

[Tom Oinn <tm...@ebi.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I was wondering how easy it would be to incorporate an interceptor
system into axis, or whether anyone else was already considering doing
so? 

The problem I am trying to solve is as follows:

We are a research institute, and as such consist of many different
groups, these are almost totally independent in terms of coding styles,
standards etc. For anyone who's curious, we are the main bioscience
resource hub for europe, the page www.ebi.ac.uk gives some idea of the
problems we're trying to solve as a whole.

We are trying to sort out some central policy for exposing our resources
as web services, included in which is a security and load balancing
policy that we would like to apply to all exposed services. However, if
we were to require all the component services to implement this it would
be a nightmare; herding cats has nothing on trying to get an institute
full of academics to code to a standard :)

Soooo... it would be good if we could implement the access control
components independently of the services. The GLUE tool kit allows
something like this but I am not terribly keen on it for many other
reasons, so am investigating the alternatives. We would like to end up
with a model where we can write a request interceptor, which then has
access to parameters of the request (some of which are transport
specific, such as the ssl principal) and can optionally modify or veto
the request altogether, sending a suitable exception message back to the
client.

I'm happy to implement or assist with the implementation of this if
people think that it's something that's feasible to do?

Cheers,

Tom Oinn