I spent a little time getting familiar with PHP/SDO and had some more thoughts about cross language interop testing. For SDO the most basic test is to read and write an XML file from PHP/JAVA/C++ and compare the results. We could develop this to test other functions such as creating, updating and deleting content and again comparing the content from the different implementations. Assuming we start with the same input we would expect the outputs to be compatible.
Is there an XML file somewhere that contains the full set of supported types and type constructs? Where relational DASs are implemented Similar tests could be carried out with relational data ensuring that type conversions are performed accurately and consistently across implementations by reading out of a database and printing out the data for comparison or by inserting back into a database for comparison. We could also look at how consistently the implementations convert from one DAS type to another but I guess this is not strictly an interoperability issue. Is there an intention that SDO change histories will be shared? If so this is something else that you could expect to be transferred across language boundaries and hence we should think about how to test this. Once the work is done to have C++ support Axis2 we should do some SCA interop testing also. In the near term we could do some basic testing based on SDO/axiom conversions if it's thought that to be worth it. I'm happy to spend time setting up tests if we can agree which ones are required. Thoughts Regards Simon
