Re: Proposal for Describing Web Services that Refer to Other Web Services: R085

Hi Arthur,

I want to focus on one very small statement in your proposal which I
believe is indicative of a much larger problem with the current
approach to Web services.  After doing that though, I'll offer a
counter-proposal.

You wrote;
"In some cases a URI is[sic] not sufficient to identify a Web service
endpoint."

When used properly, a URI is *always* sufficient, because there always
exists some finite amount of information which is required to use *any*
service.  URIs were designed to hold *all* that information, either
within the URI itself, or by deference to some other widely adopted
standard (e.g. HTTP's default port is 80, as registered with IANA).
Because of this, URIs already provide a means of bridging the gap
between a Web service endpoint, and the interface presented by that
endpoint; the URI scheme.  For example, if I see a "ftp:" URI, I know I
can access the resource with the application interface described in RFC
959, and, say, invoke the RETR application method to retrieve the
identified file.

As this relates to R085 and your proposal, I'd propose that instead of
using an approach such as wsdl:endpoint or wsa:EndpointReference, both
of which assume that this "gap" is inherrent, that a new URI scheme be
used instead;

  wsep://example.org/foo/bar

(where "wsep" stands for "Web service endpoint")

There's still lots more to be said, but I'll stop there for the moment.
You might be able to see where I'm going with this.

Thanks.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Thursday, 24 April 2003 15:58:21 UTC