Mark Baker picked up on an early draft of a paper about managing and accessing state that Prof. Ian Foster wrote some time ago and sent to a mailing list for comments. Paul Watson, Mark Mc Keown, and I are now co-authors on that paper (well, I hope our names are still there given that I haven’t done any work on the paper for some time now). Ian was very kind to invite us to co-author it even though he did most of the work on it. This was due to the extensive comments/suggestions/corrections we sent and I suspect the fact that we’ve been advocating a different approach all along. It’s always nice to see researchers working together to document and analyse their different views on a subject even though the conclusions may be not always be the same. This can only be good for the community. Full respect and credit to Ian for doing this.

I’ve had the lock on the paper for a looooooong time but given that I have been busy with my move to Microsoft, I haven’t been able to make any progress to it. As I said in a comment to Mark‘s post, I was planning to send a new draft around to the rest of the authors today. So, Mark‘s post was extremely timely even though he had no idea about my involvement and my plans for the draft 🙂 Anyway, I am hoping that some of the REST misunderstandings will be resolved and there will be an accurate description of it in the paper.

A lot of credit has to be given to Mark Mc Keown and other people at Manchester (one of whom, Jon MacLaren is now at CCT LSU) for bringing the REST architectural style under the radar of the Grid community. MEST is of course the way to go but it’s good to see MEST‘s cousin and inspiration around 🙂