RE: Stateful Web Services...

Mark,

That's not transferring "all" state.  Every solution I have seen mentioned
here deals with the issue of large amounts of state by storing it on the
back end, and passing information about how to get at it -- maybe a key,
maybe something else.  I stick by my statement -- what gets in the way of
scalability is affinity to a particular endpoint.

If I had to transfer all the balances and positions for my customers each
time so that I could value a portfolio, I would never be able to handle the
hundreds of thousands of concurrent users we do every day.

Chalon Mullins
Technical Director, Infrastructure Strategy and Architecture
Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.
SF211MN-08-472
101 Montgomery St
San Francisco, CA 94104
phone:  (415) 667-1117


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] 
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 11:14 AM
To: Mullins, Chalon
Cc: 'Savas Parastatidis'; www-ws@w3.org; Ian Foster; Carl Kesselman; Steve
Graham; Steve Tuecke
Subject: Re: Stateful Web Services...

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 08:30:31AM -0700, Mullins, Chalon wrote:
> You cannot scale large systems if you have to assume all state has to be
> transferred every time.

Actually, the opposite is true.  The largest information systems we
humans have built have been stateless.  The Web (at least the bulk of it
which doesn't use cookies) is perhaps the best example, but email would
be another one.

See;

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5
_1_3

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Friday, 29 October 2004 18:16:32 UTC