RE: concatenating web services

Hi Don,
Thanks for commenting on this.

I do understand that the purpose of WS-Routing is for defining a routing
mechanism ;).

My question, or I guess it was more than a question, it was a suggestion,
was that the intermediaries can do more than blindly pass the message on.
That certainly has value by itself (e.g., for mixing transports along the
way), but allowing the intermediaries to do something 'interesting' to the
message contents along the way holds the power of enabling a decentralized
form of simple orchestration, a pipelining. And it parallels many real-world
semantics of process flow.

Of course, I was just exploring what seemed to be some interesting ground
here...Are you saying that WS-Routing should not be used for this (i.e.,
counts as 'twisted' ;)?

If so, do you have something fundamental against the concept of pipelining
services? Or is it that you believe some additional protocol is needed (not
counting authorization or mustUnderstand issues)?

Thanks,
Rand

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Box [mailto:dbox@microsoft.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 9:51 AM
To: Anne Thomas Manes; Rand Anderson; xml-dist-app@w3.org
Subject: RE: concatenating web services


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anne Thomas Manes [mailto:anne@manes.net]
> Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 1:36 PM
> To: Rand Anderson; xml-dist-app@w3.org
> 
> I don't think that web service concatenation is an intended
application
> for
> WS-Routing. WS-Routing defines a mechanism to route a message through
a
> series of SOAP intermediaries on its way to the ultimate receiver. The 
> original question involved concatenating two ultimate receivers.

Your analysis of WS-Routing is spot on. That stated, I've seen people use
WS-Routing (or home-grown variations) to do some pretty twisted things. SOAP
is pretty vague about what a SOAP intermediary can do to a message before
relaying it to the next SOAP node. 

One feature of WS-Routing that would be useful in this scenario is the
ability to do transport-independent async messaging. If one crafted the
message schemas correctly, getting the first service to send a message to
the second one wouldn't be terribly hard. 

> The new W3C WS Choreography Working Group proposes to define a
language
> which would allow you to create a composite web service that would 
> coordinate this type of process. The announcement for the group only
came
> out yesterday, so they haven't delivered very much yet. You might look
at
> WSCI (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsci/).

I think a simple XSLT (or equivalent) would solve this guy's problem. 

> You also might look at Collaxa
(http://www.collaxa.com/home.index.jsp). I
> think they can do something like this. But you still have to create a
new
> service that coordinates the concatenation.
> 
> Anne
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org
[mailto:xml-dist-app-request@w3.org]On
> > Behalf Of Rand Anderson
> > Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 2:38 PM
> > To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> > Subject: RE: concatenating web services
> >
> >
> >
> > You may want to take a look at the WS-Routing protocol 
> > (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=ws%2Drouting).
> >
> > HTH,
> > Rand
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Vix [mailto:vixcc@yahoo.com]
> > > Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 2:05 PM
> > > To: Sudhir Agarwal; xml-dist-app@w3.org
> > > Subject: Re: concatenating web services
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > i would like to know, whether it is possible to pipe the
> > > output of one
> > > > web services to the input of the other web service.
> > > ...
> > > > i want to avoid that the client c gets all the temperature
> > > data from
> > > > ws1 which it then sends to sw2 which calculates the average
> > > and sends
> > > > the answer to c. i would rather like to tell ws1 somehow
> > > (how? that is
> > > > actually my question) to send its output (list of
> > > temperatures) to ws2
> > > > and not to c. ws2 must be able interpret it as its input
> > > and must know
> > > > that it should send its output
> > > > (average) to c and not to ws1.
> > >
> > >
> > > I don't know of any existing possibility.
> > > However, I would be really careful with this if it exists. This is 
> > > simply because lots of security issues might be raised
there.
> > >
> > > Please let me know if any such possibility exists.
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > >
> > > Victor
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > =====
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Received on Monday, 10 February 2003 16:53:27 UTC