The new paragraph on REST and some more comments

Following from my previous post, here is the revised (again) paragraph that Jim Webber and I agreed on.

There have been proposals for naming and uniformly providing access to resources, such as the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) [24] model. However, REST depends on a naming scheme for resources which couples the semantics of an interface with the identified state (e.g., http://domainname/resource-ID suggests that only the HTTP GET/PUT/POST/DELETE operations can be applied on the identified resource). The semantics of the interface are transfer-protocol-depended. We believe that this is unsuitable for heterogeneous systems like the Grid where resources may be accessed/modified by services in any number of complex ways.

I do hope that Mark is happier with the language now, although I don’t expect us to agree on the approach for building loosely-coupled applications as he seems to like WS-RF. However, I think he’s going to like our proposal even more since we accommodate REST as one of the possible ways service builders may like to provide access to their resources. Our proposal is about a framework for providing metadata information about a resource that is named outside the boundaries of a service. The paper that gives more details about our ideas is in the last stages of the editing process.

An initial message giving a hint about our ideas was sent to the WS-GAF mailing list today in order to start the discussions and get some feedback. If you want the attachments that are referred in my message, please drop me a line. The February archives of the WS-GAF mailing list are here. You can find out how to subscribe to the mailing list here.