Monthly Archives: May 2003

Transport, transfer, and coordination generality

I was just reading over an article that gives a very high level overview of GXA, which, like so many others, makes the fundamental mistake of talking about HTTP as a “transport protocol”. Of course, one only need look at the HTTP spec to see that it’s not, it’s a transfer protocol, which is a… Read More »

Coordination Languages

Edwin points to some BPEL presentations. I read Satish’s (PPT), and saw the term “coordination language” mentioned in the context of Web services for the very first time. It’s about time, as the Internet’s application layer is populated by a variety of coordination languages, otherwise known as application protocols.

TimBL’s WWW2003 Keynote

Werner Vogels writes; The keynote was by Tim Berners-Lee who did a truly awful job in trying to make a connection between web services and the semantic web. Yup, absolutely agreed. I read over his slides last night, and, like Werner says, was waiting for some new connection to be presented that I also hadn’t… Read More »

Gauntlet Tossing

Yesterday, I proposed a new issue to the TAG regarding what I consider factual errors in the recently published draft of the Web Services Architecture document concerning the architectural property of visibility. You can read the text for yourself, but I thought I’d explain why I raised this issue and not the more general and… Read More »

Color

My inbox collected a few, erm, “colorful” emails this past weekend. It seems that more than a few people have had enough of my pro Web architecture position. I’m confident of my earlier predictions, but perhaps I underestimated how nasty this is going to get. If these messages are any indication, this will be indistinguishable… Read More »

Tim Bray on REST and Web services

A very nice piece from Tim on how Web services should look; RESTful. Dave, Sam, and Don have all responded. First, to Tim, right on man. It’s about time too. For quite a while, he’s seemed to be on the fence, but this seems to make it quite clear where he stands, and hopefully where… Read More »

Crossing trust boundaries

Sam writes; A distributed system across trust boundaries is where I believe we are collectively heading. Hey, wait a sec’, we’re already there; the Web and email cross trust boundaries. We even know why that worked too, so we have no excuse when mistakes are made.

SOAPy Turtles

Obviously, Sean just doesn’t get it. You’ve got to be protocol independent, so that you can invent a new application protocol on top (i.e. DocSOAP) upon which you are then allowed to become dependent. Silly wabbit. Show me a WSDL document, and I’ll show you a poorly designed application protocol.

Pub/Sub on the Web

Sean asks for pub/sub on the Web. I wonder if he’s familiar with KnowNow, and in particular their open source project, mod_pubsub? They’ve got some nifty demo apps you can play with too. We implemented something similar at Idokorro too, but for mobile clients which had our own browser installed (with its own embedded web… Read More »