Re: Normative constraints on the WSA

> This current generation of Web services technology uses (abuses?) the Web.
> But it is NOT the Web. It is RPC-oriented middleware -- it is
> service-centric rather than resource-centric. It's about verbs rather than
> nouns. If I recall correctly, the folks that originally came together in
> April 2001 to talk about Web services and that recommended the immediate
> formation of this group weren't even thinking about REST at the time. We
> were thinking about RPC. And we wanted to define an over-arching
> architecture for this type of middleware.
>
> I think that's what this group should focus on.

I'm not saying you're wrong here; you've been around it way longer
than me, but I had the strong impression that EVERYONE at this
point felt that RPC was dead as the principal pattern of Web Services.
Recently I asked Chris Ferris whether some WSA language ought to
include reference to RPC, and the anwer was 'no', for example.

Why the current interest in "service orientation", by the way?  It
seems counter to the almost ubiquitous revolution from procedural
programming application models to object orientation.  What service
can a "service oriented" application provide that a "resource oriented"
one cannot?  I would say they are both about "action", and I'd be
interested to know whether people see one model subsuming the other,
and if so, which model that would be.

>
> At the same time, I think that it would be an excellent endeavor to work
on
> the next generation of Web services -- a RESTful version of Web services.
> I'd love to see another Working Group started to focus on this work. I
just
> don't think that this work should interfere any further with the immediate
> work at hand.

At the level where end clients would have interest, would these two
groups be solving different problems, or solving the same problem?

> Most of the retail commerce success is based on CGI/ASP/JSP -- which very
> definitely tunnels method calls through HTTP. It isn't RESTful.

?? JSP is a convenience for Java HTTP Servlet, which is typically
set up to GET and POST for all operations, but can easily be configured
so the application can also use PUT and DELETE.  Where is the
tunnel?

Walden

Received on Sunday, 18 May 2003 12:53:37 UTC