Monthly Archives: September 2002

Ken Arnold on Distributed Computing

Ken Arnold gives a wonderful interview on distributed computing and the inherrent problems associated with it. Brilliantly done, modulo a slightly confusing answer about state; he seems to also be confusing application and session state, in part at least. I can’t imagine developing a system without object state, since for most systems it’s a requirement… Read More »

SOAP’s history

There are two kinds of people; those that believe that XML-RPC was SOAP‘s predecessor, and those that believe that PEP was.

REST Compared

I gave a presentation to the Web Services Architecture WG last week. It focuses on comparing REST with other “distributed object” styles, specifically tuple spaces, OO RPC, and email. The pushback I got on it at the meeting was “But REST is for humans!” (wrong). The question I posed at the end never got answered,… Read More »

"Application State"

Paul Prescod responds to Adam Bosworth’s “One Fell Swoop” article. Right on again. But there was something else in there that I felt needed some clarification; application state. Adam writes; […]Thinking of the Web servers as “objects” is an extremely bad idea. Objects are repositories of state. Conversations with them are by definition not stateless.[…]… Read More »

SOAP SMTP binding security

Just noticed Simon’s reference to his SOAP SMTP binding spec. Section 6, “Security Considerations” says “This should introduce no new security considerations.”. Bzzt! 8-) Consider that by requiring the SOAP response in a new email, rather than using the SMTP response as the response, you’re requiring that any deployed implementation of software conforming to this… Read More »

Odd views by Web services proponents

So while at the Web Services Architecture WG face-to-face, I was chatting with an unnamed attendee about the eventual “Judgement Day” for Web services; the day when the TAG, and/or TimBL will decide whether or not Web services have anything to do with the Web. This person, who is very likable and definitely well respected… Read More »

Relocated!

I’ve finally relocated my principle blog from the RSS-challenged grasp of Blogger, thanks to some help from Sam Ruby and Blosxom. The old one is no longer maintained. I’ll have to extract the archives into Blosxom. I’ll add that to my to-do list. Uh huh.

Sam responds

Sam responds For those who want to understand the issue Mark has with SOAP, he objects to the string “doGoogleSearch” in this example. FWIW, I don’t see how this is any different, architecturally, than hidden controls in HTML. It isn’t any different than hidden controls, but I wouldn’t use hidden controls either. I’d just POST… Read More »

Sam asks

Sam asks Now it turns out that the Google API has a limit of a 1,000 queries per day. This means that the 1,001st query will not have the same result as the 1,000th query. The query itself has a (GASP!) side effect. It is most decidedly not idempotent. So what do you do? Call… Read More »