Are resources the new objects? Proposal to rename “Web Services” to “Distributed Objects Revisited”

Yup, yet another spec; this time for managing resources. It’s called WS-Management and I guess it’s in direct competition with the WS-RF-based WS-Distributed Management (WS-DM). Oh well šŸ™

It seems that this specification follows the recent trend to reason in terms of resources instead of services. I really enjoyed the following while reading the WS-Management:

Resource Service: A Web service that provides access to a single category of manageable items, such as disk drives or running processes, that share the same operations and representation schema.

Now, can anyone tell me how this definition of the ā€œresource serviceā€ is different from:

public class DiskDrive


{

// This is the disk drive's state

public long Capacity;

public long Free;

public void ParkHeads() {...}

public void Format() {...}

}

You see? Common methods (operations) for all objects (items) and public data properties (representation schema). Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against distributed objects. It’s just that I fear that toolkits will just make it sooooo easy to expose fine-grained objects (together with their state) as resources out there. Network-wide references to state (even if it’s representation of state) will be created. Interdependencies that cross service boundaries will be introduced and it’d be extremely difficult to manage them.

You see, in WS-Management, as with WS-Transfer, every manageable resource is addressed through WS-Addressing with the ReferenceProperties header containing an element which identifies the ā€œitemā€ behind the service boundary. Since WS-Addressing is treated as an opaque construct, it’s effectively a pointer.

It seems to me that the most recent specifications are moving us back to a distributed objects world. I recommend that we rename the suite of technologies from ā€œWeb Servicesā€ to ā€œDistributed Objects Revisited (DOR)ā€ since they have nothing to do with the Web and they are sooooo moving away from the concepts of service-orientation. At least the removal of ā€œWebā€ will make the REST folks happy šŸ™‚

Recent Posts

BrainExpanded – Web app and Data Sources

As I wrote in previous posts, the manual recording of memories for BrainExpanded is just…

3 days ago

BrainExpanded – End-to-end working

Imagine a world where your memory is enhanced by a team of intelligent agents, working…

2 weeks ago

BrainExpanded – Login State Caching Issue in iOS Share Extension

As part of the BrainExpanded project, I’m building an iOS app that lets users easily…

2 months ago

Is AI Good or Bad?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved over the past few decades, becoming an integral part…

2 months ago

BrainExpanded – Copilot

Happy New Year everyone! I was planning for my next BrainExpanded post to be a…

4 months ago

BrainExpanded – The Timeline

See "BrainExpanded - Introduction" for context on this post. Notes and links Over the years,…

4 months ago