Just reading through a relatively recent update to the Grid’s Grid Service Specification. In there, they actually provide some (extended) WSDL that is used to access all Grid services; a generic interface, who would’ve thunk it? Some of the relevant text from that part of the spec includes;
In order to support discovery, introspection, and monitoring of Grid service instances, we introduce the concept of service data, which refers to descriptive information about a Grid service instance, including both meta-data (information about the service instance) and state data (runtime properties of the service instance). — from section 4.4
So it’s good to see them getting this important aspect right (at least to an extent – it’s still much less useful than GET/PUT/POST/etc..), but it would be nice to see them embrace the Web rather than getting distracted with what people know to be Web services, since the Web already does most of the things they’re trying to do, and many beneficial things they haven’t even thought about. I attended a BOF of theirs at WWW 2002, and they had absolutely no interest in using URIs (though I see they’re using them as Grid Service Handlers), and thought that protocol independance was a feature, not a bug. They really need a protocol guru on the team; without one, and some major changes, the Grid isn’t going anywhere.
no comment until now