RE: Web Service Description and stateful services

Absolutely right on the button I think. (Makes crash recovery a whole bunch
easier too.)

The service should always be able to "reconstruct" its internal state
machine that implements the business logic with the message that causes the
service invocation.

> IMO the Web service as a Web service - whatever that elusive 
> definition 
> is - should be stateless. But in a lot of cases there would 
> be a state 
> behind it and it would be accessed by referencing that state. 
> Think of 
> your trusty bank teller. He/she/it is stateless, you can go to any 
> teller that is available or use an ATM machine to access your 
> account. 
> But there's some state that you would always reference by giving an 
> account number before performing any transaction. And the notion of 
> providing an account information to carry out a transaction 
> is part of 
> the interface definition of all tellers.

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2003 14:40:43 UTC