Re: Stateful Web Services...

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 07:51:38AM -0800, Mullins, Chalon wrote:
> So -- servers will have state.  And we (meaning the IT side of my firm) do a
> lot of work specifically to address issues such as reliability and
> scalability because servers have state.  We do use caching.  We do use
> replication.  We explicitly manage resources.

Yes, of course, servers will practically always have state.  But that's
not what Walden and I were talking about.  I tried to rephrase what I
said to him, but I don't think I can do it any better than I did, sorry.

> What I think WS-RF *(and OGSI before it) is about is defining a standard
> convention for providing these references to state.  And, yes, that could be
> passed in a WS-Context, so WS-Contest is relevant, it's just not a complete
> answer.  You need a way to talk about what WS-RF calls Resources.  And then
> the vendors can go to work on soft state management, caching, replication,
> and the like (actually, they're working on it and in some cases delivering
> it already).

FWIW, I think URIs suffice as a state referencing mechanism.  The good
ones are dereferencable so that anybody can use it to get the referenced
state using mature, pervasively deployed commodity software.  Akamai et
al seem to have the caching and replication thing figured out too, based
on URIs as references.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Friday, 5 November 2004 06:30:53 UTC