Monthly Archives: December 2003

Who stole the network effects?

It’s Dec 31, and time to see how my past predictions have done. I predicted that XMethods would list less than 400 services by today, and lo-and-behold, that’s the case; they list 366. Am I psychic? Have I hacked XMethods? Nope, I just performed simple linear extrapolation. Why linear? Because Web services have extraordinarily poor… Read More »

Patrick Logan digs deeper

He writes; Is it a transport protocol or not? Definitely not a transport protocol. It’s a state transfer protocol. The difference is this: the HTTP interface is vague and the Linda interface is specific. Linda has precise, simple semantics. The possible range of behaviors exhibited in Linda-based systems benefit from being layered on *top* of… Read More »

The REST/tuple-space meme makes the rounds

This is goodness, though I’m embarassed that it took me so long to get plugged into; I’m too many degrees of separation away from some communities that are important to my work. Time to update my weblog subscriptions. Here’s what’s been said the past week; Michael Champion on Adam Bosworth’s XML 2003 keynote Vanessa Williams… Read More »

Welcome Dave Orchard

… to the land of blogdom. telnet proxy.markbaker.ca 80 MONITOR http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1 Host: www.pacificspirit.com Reply-To: http://www.markbaker.ca/private/ Content-Length: 0 aka “subscribed”

Respect

It may only be an automata, but I’m gettin’ good lovin’ from The Classic IQ Test; Mark, you are a Visionary Philosopher. This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways. Update; they ask for personal info on page… Read More »

Bootstrapping and componentware

The Web Services Description WG offered up their latest attempt at an HTTP binding for WSDL last week. I think it’s about as good as you can hope something like that to get, without rejecting Web services. But it seems the group asked itself some good questions while reviewing it, in particular this one; Is… Read More »

Dave Bettin on message metadata

Dave Bettin comments on my previous blog entry. He writes; Mark Baker discusses the causality of redundant message metadata due to the protocol independence nature of Soap. HTTP is not the omnipresent protocol in the services ecosystem; i.e., there are internal business cases where HTTP is not necessary and straight TCP is preferred. I want… Read More »

Transfer vs transport again

John Beatty reminded me that a friend told me a great business (aka non-plumbing) description of the differences between transport and transfer in the supply chain management space, where they use those very same terms. Paraphrasing, he said; Transport refers to the movement of goods between locations. Transfer refers to the change of ownership of… Read More »

Message metadata

From early on in my work as a member of the XML Protocol WG to make SOAP 1.2 usable in a REST based architecture, I found myself up against the unmoveable force known as “protocol independence”. I was reflecting on this experience in the car this morning, and realized that I could perhaps explain the… Read More »

Definition by concensus

Compare and contrast. Werner Vogels writes; A common trend still is that there are no generally accepted definitions of (web) services, and people spent way too much time criticising each others definitions. Dan Connolly wrote, this in response to a question regarding the value of dereferenceable URIs; my answer to “but what if I don’t… Read More »