Re: Semantic Web needed for RESTful Web services? (RE: Binding)

"Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org> writes:
> 
> So in this case, deployed code such as wget (a handy *nix command line
> tool for invoking GET, for those not familiar with it) can get data from
> Web sites that didn't exist when it was created.  That seems totally
> obvious and trivial, yet I've heard Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink say that
> in 5 years or so, Web services may get this advanced capability!

That's utter nosense. The Web Service Invocation Framework (see
http://xml.apache.org/axis/wsif) can be used to  invoke any Web 
service without using any custom code. That is, it can invole any 
Web service whether or not it existed at the time the WSIF API
was built. Its basically a WSDL-driven DII (dynamic invocation
interface) for Web services. By using WSIF, our BPEL4WS 
implementation (BPWS4J on www.alphaWorks.ibm.com) can invoke any
Web service and manipulate the results without generating a single
line of code - its all dynamic.

There's nothing special at the code level whether the "operation"
is GET or something that's looked up from a WSDL and dropped inside
a SOAP envelope.

> However, while getting the data isn't the whole story, it's an important
> part of it.  Once you've agreed on that, you can bootstrap new stuff
> through that data ... which has its own problems, but those are also
> manageable.

WSDL provides the metadata needed to tell the client "how" and 
"where" to get to the data as well as the structure of the data. 
Semantics of the data is out-of-band; just like with REST.

Sanjiva.

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 11:44:12 UTC