Decide on IIA editing architecture (centralized vs. decentralized)

[wrygiel]

In general, most of the EWP Network will be decentralized. However, there is one entity for which using a decentralized solution is highly disputable - Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs).

There are two ways in which we can design editing and publishing IIAs.

Centralized solution

We implement a single web application and host it on the EWP server (together with the Registry itself). We allow proper IRO members to sign in there, and edit IIAs associated with their HEIs.

Decentralized solution

We require every EWP Network member to implement his own, separate web application for that.

[wrygiel]

@erasmus-without-paper/wp3 @erasmus-without-paper/wp4

[wrygiel]

I would vote for the centralized solution in this case. Some arguments:

• It's much less work for the newcomers. We want to minimize the effort, in order to make the EWP Network easy to join.
• There are lots of quite complex issues that will need to be implemented in each such server. Each implementation will need to able to resolve edit conflicts and possibly handle other race conditions which might surface (especially in a distributed environment). If we pick decentralized solution then it's more probable that some implementations will suffer from errors.
• I suspect that IIA is the entity which is most susceptible to be in need of a some changes as the years pass. If this ever happens, then obviously central solution is a much safer choice. It's only a single server that will need to be updated.
• It is true that we will have a single point of failure in a centralized solution, but this argument seems not so strong in case of IIAs. Since IIAs are created and edited so rarely, and all EWP Hosts keep a copy of them, it's almost certain that nothing bad will happen if the service goes offline for a couple of hours.
• The resources we save could be used for designing a better (prettier) GUI for the central application. Also, later on, we could choose for some of the statistical information to be available for anonymous visitors, thus allowing them live insights into how the EWP Network grows.

[wrygiel]

Related topic: https://github.com/erasmus-without-paper/general-issues/issues/12

We are currently designing an alternate IIA Host API which, once approved, will replace the previous IIA APIs, and then we will officially support the decentralized IIA architecture.

[wrygiel]

After https://github.com/erasmus-without-paper/general-issues/issues/12 this is no longer relevant topic. IIAs won't be edited via EWP APIs.