RE: WSDL, app protocols, URI schemes

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 11:53 PM
> To: David Orchard
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: WSDL, app protocols, URI schemes
> 
> 

> 
> Anyhow, talk is cheap. 

Indeed!

>  Show me a problem that Web services claim to
> solve that the Web doesn't have a solution for. 

The same can be said (proven?) about a Turing machine.  I can imagine how
the REST operations can be mapped onto Turings operations, or onto Codd's
relational algebra, thus I will believe from my little thought experiment
that you can solve any problem with the Web.  Your point is well taken.

But uhh, so what?  As you say, talk is cheap, thought experiments are cheap.
But how many real software projects really build on the formal model of a
Turing machine? (Well, I guess those that base their designs on FSMs do so
indirectly ...)  How about "pure" relational applications?  To hear people
like C. J. Date rant, the database industry has strayed a long way from the
purity of Codd's vision.  [aside: There's a relational model zealot named
Fabian Pascal who started ranting about the evils of XML a year or so ago; I
made the mistake of sending him a long (attempting to be conciliatory)
reply, and my stupidity, poor education, and lack of knowledge about the
computing industry was featured in his column for the next couple of months
:-) ]

My point is that I hope we can get beyond this "you really don't need all
this other junk, you can simply Do It The One True Way" stuff.  Dave
Orchard, and I, and surely  a bunch of others here have noted how much we
have learned from Dr. Fielding, directly or indirectly.  I think it's clear
from the TAG - XMLP discussions 6 months ago that people in the Web services
community are listening. 


> Deal?

No, you'd be taking my money!  I want something in return: some
constructive ideas about how to do things like ...

-- draw the Web services architecture diagrams in a way that is
REST-friendly
-- use the Web to manage the state of long-running multipart service
invocations
-- use RESTful ideas to coordinate asynchronous services
-- use HTTP to help manage web servies (you might have something to day
about that,
   Mark Baker, if you choose to share the expertise that you sell ...)
-- Apply the ideas that have proven themselves on the Web to Web services so
as to   
   help ensure their scalability, etc.
-- Apply REST ideas at a much more palatable level of abstraction so that we
   don't ask applications developers to work at the level of (metaphorically
   speaking) "assembly language" or even "Turing machines."

Received on Saturday, 28 September 2002 10:20:21 UTC