RE: Stateful Web Services...

Fair enough.  

In this case, I disagree with Roy that statelessness always improves
scalability.  In a rarity for his thesis, his claim is not backed up by
any reference.  

We've seen some rather interesting advances over the past 10 years in
app servers wrt scalability and state management.  I've seen some #s in
the past about doing straight up comparison that show which scenarios
are better for which style, but I don't think they are publicly
available.  

Needless to say, Roy's claim is not backed up by any references so my
claim is just as valid on the face of it.  Also, my company does ship
software that deals with high reliability and scalability systems so we
do know a thing or to.

I guess we could trade 3rd party claims or our own personal analysis.

BTW, we've also shown that reliability of stateful services can be just
as high as stateless when the server is deployed in certain
configurations, refuting reference 133.  I can tell you privately about
some amazing reliability stories that happened a few years ago.

Cheers,
Dave


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 4:47 PM
> To: David Orchard
> Cc: www-ws@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Stateful Web Services...
> 
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 02:11:46PM -0700, David Orchard wrote:
> > It's the old
> > engineering answer, "it depends".
> 
> Of course it is, David.  You say that (repeatedly!) like I'm unaware
of
> it.  That is simply not the case.
> 
> Since we're quoting REST, let me point this out;
> 
> "[statelessness] induces the properties of visibility, reliability,
and
> scalability. [...] Scalability is improved because not having to store
> state between requests allows the server component to quickly free
> resources, and further simplifies implementation because the server
> doesn't have to manage resource usage across requests."
>   --
>
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#s
ec
> _5_1_3
> 
> which directly refutes your claim here;
> 
> "Stateful vs stateless is really a question of trade-offs of desired
> properties that the service provider makes, and scale is not one of
> them."
>   -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws/2004Oct/0038.html
> 
> Mark.
> --
> Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2004 06:22:47 UTC