Article on WS architecture and best practice ... may be of intere st

This is more of a pointer to an article of general interest than something
for the WG to worry about.
http://www.adtmag.com/print.asp?id=6798

"Web services architectures: Easier said than done" 

"The distributed and multivendor nature of Web services-based applications
requires a foundation based on a well-thought-out architecture. However, the
principles underlying architecting Web services-based applications are
significantly different from typical n-tier applications. The following
salient points present some practical guidelines for building applications
based on this new paradigm."

[a couple of interesting ones]

"6. Do not generate the SOAP interface from implementations (VS .NET
syndrome). VS .NET greatly simplifies the creation of Web services. One
simply adds a Web method declaration to a method and VS .NET generates all
of the code necessary to expose it as a Web service. Yet this methodology
defeats the whole purpose of Web services, which is to hide the
implementation of a service completely behind an XML-based interface. VS
.NET generates the interface from the implementation. While it is tempting
to do so, avoid creating Web services as an afterthought in VS .NET."

"11. Compose services together to create more complex interactions. ...
There are several different topologies that can be built here. In a pipes
and filters paradigm, each service does some processing and passes the
request on to the next service for further work. ...
In a dispatch-based architecture, the original service acts as a broker and,
based on the request, dispatches to one of several real services whose
response it returns."


I can imagine using "harvesting" these (as a starting point for discussion,
of course) if we get into best practices at some point.

Received on Thursday, 3 October 2002 12:10:46 UTC