Issue 15 - Redirection

Issue 15 concerns EPR redirection and was raised in the belief that, 
since this is a common usage on the Web, having the same facility in 
WS-Addressing would also be valuable. E.g. when I submit a form or 
click a link to buy something from a web site, that web site often 
responds by setting a cookie that can be used to identify me in 
subsequent interactions. In some cases the cookie will identify a 
server side session that in turn contains useful data and in other 
cases it may directly contain useful data.

Applying this pattern to WS-Addressing one might imagine a client using 
an EPR to communicate with a service and then having that service 
respond with an updated EPR for use in subsequent interactions. The 
updated EPR might contain an additional reference parameter to hold a 
session identifier or other useful data. Its also possible that the 
updated EPR might contain some new address information.

The WSDL binding for addressing describes how addressing properties are 
used in WSDL MEPs. One could imagine adding additional semantics to 
something like the [reply endpoint] property such that if it were 
included in a response message, then subsequent messages in the same 
logical conversation would be required to be sent to that EPR instead 
of the original (use of [reply endpoint] in responses is currently 
allowed by the specification but has undefined semantics). However to 
do that we'd probably have to get into talking about conversations and 
possibly re-open the discussion on EPR life-cycle.

A colleague of mine pointed me at WS-Context[1], this seems to fulfill 
the use case I outlined above quite nicely and goes much further to 
also support multi-party contextualization. So, rather than spend time 
in the addressing WG working on the problem I outlined, I instead 
propose that we declare redirection to be out-of-scope and close issue 
15 with no action.

Regards,
Marc.

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=ws-caf

---
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley at sun.com>
Web Technologies and Standards, Sun Microsystems.

Received on Thursday, 27 January 2005 22:47:06 UTC