Monthly Archives: March 2004

Are Web services unknowingly using the uniform interface?

Answer me this; is it the objective of the Web services architecture to permit a document (e.g. a purchase order) to be submitted to any service for processing? If so, then how is this different than having every service implement a common “process this document” (aka POST) operation? That’s what uniform means.

Savas on ITMS

Savas says that iTunes is doing a proprietary version of Web services. I don’t think so. He writes; If, however, they wanted to describe the structure of that information, how would they do it? They’d probably use XML Schema. Yep, agreed there. I think RDF would be a better solution, but given they’re using plain… Read More »

The iTunes Music Store and the non-browser Web

Via Mnot, Aaron’s reverse engineering ITMS. So let me understand… ITMS is presenting an HTTP/URI based interface intended for use by automata, and not human-controlled browsers? How is such a thing possible?! THE WEB IS FOR HUMANS (isn’t it?)! Head .. about to … explode. 8-)

Steve Vinoski responds

Steve responds to my response to his article. One of Mark’s comments was about my discussion around the difficulties of using URIs to represent some types of endpoints such as message queues. I don’t disagree with Mark that you could devise a way to do it, but it’s just that there’s no good standardized way… Read More »

Reusing the Web

Thought for the day; how different would the Web services architecture be, if the Web didn’t exist?

World Wide What?

Via Savas, a pointer to a paper by Jeff Schneider titled The World Wide Grid. It includes some incorrect assumptions about the Web that I’d like to address. Luckily, they’re summed up in this statement; The focus for the web was to describe pages that could be linked together and read by people. Bzzt. Can… Read More »

More on Linda/Web

Patrick and Stefan pick up on my “Linda did win” meme Obviously the Web isn’t Linda; clearly, there are important differences. But IMO, there are more important similarities. Both Stefan and Patrick claim, in effect, that the way the Web is used today doesn’t leverage those similarities. While I agree that we haven’t yet taken… Read More »

If TCP were a Web services spec …

… you’d have to negotiate much of the hard stuff that TCP accomplishes (e.g. flow control), for each different party you wanted to interact with. When building an Internet scale machine-to-machine stack, your objective is to embue it with sufficient information to enable ad-hoc integration between parties which implement it. Agreeing on only a “messaging… Read More »

Tim Bray on Sun and Linda

Congratulations to Tim on his new position at Sun. In an interview he gave about the move, he said something interesting that I’d like to comment on. When asked whether he’d looked into peer-to-peer technologies, he said; Only trivially. That has some roots of its thinking in the old Linda [parallel programming coordination language] technology… Read More »

Jim and Savas on services and resources

Jim writes, regarding a diagram by Savas; It shows that managing virtualised resources across organisations isn’t scalable, whereas composition of services is. Why the difference in terms of scalability? In the service-oriented view, services can manage whatever backend resources they have for themselves, therefore the complexity of the application driving the services increases linearly with… Read More »