RE: Web services and CORBA

On the question of BTP's alignment with REST, although it might be possible
to have a BTP "carrier" binding that was REST-aligned, I think that might in
fact be following the letter of REST while contradicting the spirit.

The whole point of BTP is to establish a stateful relationship between
multiple parties, so that if the coordinating entity can determine that a
consistent solution is possible, it can say to the parties "confirm the
operation I told you about before".  After that confirm is sent, the
stateful relationship ends.

You need to have that stateful relationship if there is to be any consistent
decision over multiple parties. If two are to agree, it is inevitable that
at some point at least one party will be in a condition where it has made
itself subject to someone else's decision. You can squeeze, transfer and
juggle this, but it won't go away. (A "completed" but
could-still-be-compensated operation is still such a condition).

I'm not sure how that fits with the requirement of statelessness in REST
(which I perceive as being more central to REST than specifics about GET and
POST).


Peter

------------------------------------------
Peter Furniss
Chief Scientist, Choreology Ltd
web: http://www.choreology.com
email:  peter.furniss@choreology.com
phone:  +44 20 7670 1679
direct: +44 20 7670 1783
mobile: +44 7951 536168
13 Austin Friars, London EC2N 2JX


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Mark Baker
> Sent: 29 May 2002 22:33
> To: WEBBER,JIM (HP-UnitedKingdom,ex1)
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Web services and CORBA
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 12:28:48PM +0100, WEBBER,JIM
> (HP-UnitedKingdom,ex1) wrote:
> > As Bill Pope said earlier, we have had some fun trying to decide about
> > whether we are REST conformant or not.
>
> IMO, having an agreed upon method for "give me your current state" is
> pretty critical when coordinating something as potentially complex
> as a multiparty transaction.  That's what GET does, and if you're not
> using it, I don't see how you could be doing REST.  Indeed, for some
> simple transactions, GET will be all you'll need (everybody will
> invoke GET on everybody else's resources, and therefore know what
> state each is in).
>
> But I'm sure we'll see protocols like BTP evolve. 8-)
>
> MB
> --
> Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
> Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
> http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com
>

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2002 04:46:45 UTC