• WS-Transfer and COM IUknown?

    I don’t know the details of COM so I wouldn’t recognise the GUID for IUknown. I was suprised to see COM’s IUknown interface makes an appearance in the WS-Transfer specification. If you look at the second example the WS-Addressing MessageID is 00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000046 the GUID for IUknown. This was from Benjamin Mitchell‘s blog. There is no…

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  • Utility computing centre closes

    TheRegister reports that HP has killed its “utility computing experiment”. Was this doomed to fail or was it ahead of its time? I always believed that “Grid computing” was more about hype, politics, and marketing rather than technology. Here at Newcastle we’d like to think “Grid computing” as an application of the distributed computing ideas…

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  • Tim Ewald on WS operations

    Tim Ewald suggests that Web Services only have 4 simple operations (input, output, input/output, output/input). I think that Tim really gets it but I would have to disagree with this particular comment since I don’t see these as operations; I see them as message exchange patterns. There is only one logical operation supported by every…

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  • The relationship between SOAs and Web Services (book chapter on the way)

    This is a nice post from Mark Nottingham. He talks about the lack of a good understanding of the architectural issues when we talk about Web Services. I think Mark makes a very good point. Jim and I have been thinking about this for the last couple of months and although we haven’t really blogged…

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  • Sidebar

    I always wanted to have a sidebar on my desktop which aggregates information and allows various actions to be just one click away. I know Linux users had sidebars for sometime but I never found one for WindowsXP I was happy with. I even started a VS.NET project to create one on my own but…

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  • Why I believe REST is not far from “ProcessMessage” or document-centric WS

    Mark Baker linked to this post which talks about how to access O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf using a REST API and has some example Java code. This post made me think about the relationship between the “ProcessMessage” approach that Jim and I have been advocating and REST. Are we that far apart? Well, I don’t think…

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  • “Streaming messages” in Web Services

    As part of my involvement in the activities of the Grid community, I’ve heard many times about yet another requirement that is “specific” to the Grid and requires special infrastructure and new toolkits: streaming. It is true that there is no WS-* specification I am aware of that deals explicitly with the streaming of messages…

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  • Hey… why don’t I have one of these?

    This prediction for the home computer of 2004 came from Lindsay.

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  • Great discussion on “ProcessMessage” and REST

    Over at Jim‘s blog, there is a great discussion on the differences between REST and “ProcessMessage” which started as a reply to Mark Baker‘s question.

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  • WS-Transfer: I must be missing something (and I feel lonely)

    It must be me… I can’t explain it otherwise. I must have the wrong understanding. First, it was the Grid community with OGSI and their non-standard-based, object-oriented approach to building Grid Services, then it was WS-RF with their resource-oriented view of the world and their state lifetime management, and now it’s WS-Transfer which looks like…

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