Re: Visibility

> find persuasive.  Maybe (as Walden in particular has argued on this list)
> one *could* build RESTful, idempotent interfaces to this complex,
demanding,
> and legacy stuff, and maybe y'all will demonstrate this and convince us
all.
> But, again AFAIK, such demonstrations remain hypothetical.

I'm in no position to claim that *all* complex, demanding legacy
applications
can be nicely front-ended with a Web interface; I have personal experience
with exactly ONE of these transformations.  I'm curious, though.  Can
Mike or someone sketch or drop a reference to requirements of such a
system that would, in their opinion, fail to run acceptably thus adapted?


> say about HTTP and visibility is true and desireable.  Ratchet up the
> security/reliability requirements and put some complexity on the back-end,
> however, and it's clear that the Web as we know it is not a great platform
> for web sevices without the kind of help that the SOAP-based specs offer.
> All that "visiblity" becomes a liability (as Roger has helped us
understand
> from the IT perspective).

Last I'd read, Roger retracted that report, while adding that his chief
developers weren't particularly interested in the subject of visibility.
Are
we all keeping up-to-date?

For the record, our entitlements web service (the one I helped design the
web front end for) was required to be reliable, and also had some medium
to stern requirements for security, since it was for sharing among
competing brokerage houses, trading rooms and institutional investment
management companies.  If any one of those was able to use the interface
to disable someone else's access to real-time pricing & news, there would be
serious business impact to say the least.

>  The SOAP framework and the numerous standards and
> proposals that work within it really do add value for the people working
in
> these areas.  There are costs, of course -- XML/SOAP/WS-Security-aware
> firewalls are clearly going to be more expensive in dollars and resource
> requirements than vanilla HTTP-aware firewalls are.  This is neither a
Good
> Thing nor a Bad Thing, just one more tradeoff that Web services architects
> are going to have to take into consideration.

If the higher price of gasoline is a Bad Thing, then why is the higher price
of web services neither?  (Maybe Roger knows? :-)

Walden

Received on Saturday, 1 March 2003 22:27:38 UTC