[MOBY-dev] BioMOBY Asynchronous Service Call Proposal v2.2 - <wsa:Action> tag missing for GetResourceProperty requests

[Mark Wilkinson]

v.v. the political statement:  I strongly agree with Martin, in part, and  
somewhat agree with him in another part :-)

My personal opinion on the Pseudo-Web Services approach that MOBY uses is  
that it has been more of a barrier than a benefit.  I don't think this is  
a consequence of MOBY not using all of SOAP/WSDL, I feel it is because the  
WS architecture itself is not quite as useful as it was marketed to be in  
past years.  In this regard, moving toward a REST-style architecture for  
"MOBY 2" is something I am strongly in favour of because it seems like the  
right thing to do, especially in the emergent Semantic Web world; the fact  
that it also moves us closer to the S-MOBY architecture is just icing :-)

however, v.v. the asynchronous services proposal, I think we have to lie  
in the bed we have made at least for the time being.  Fixing one of the  
most troublesome aspects of the current MOBY protocol in the short term  
for the wider community, while having the core developers explore what  
MOBY 2.0 "looks like", seems to me like a good idea, and especially if the  
proponents of the asynch proposal are building/have built the tooling for  
us already.  So, given that MOBY is already married to SOAP, it doesn't  
concern me too much if we add another SOAPy component to it.  It's a shame  
that the WSRF framework itself isn't more widely used, but if it does what  
we need it to do we might as well take advantage of it.

Just my opinion... but I'm on holiday, so I'm only using a small part of  
my brain to think about it :-)

Mark






On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:21:15 -0700, Martin Senger  
<martin.senger at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry, I was not able to read the new proposal when it came. I am still  
> not
> able to read it in all details (I am traveling and will be actually
> completely off-line next two weeks) - but I think that the proposal is  
> fine
> and I would for with it. Thanks for creating it.
>
> Just two comments:
>
> I agree that storing the fact that a service is able to be called
> asynchronously should be part of the service registration process. That
> would simplify everything. But I do not fully understand why it cannot be
> done only by registering a service with a new category (moby-async, as
> suggested). Why do we need a new boolean parameter for it? Why do we need
> 'hasCallingDetail" - here again a new category should be enough. What am  
> I
> missing?
>
> The second comment is more or less political (and I do not mean it as an
> argument against your proposal, I like your proposal):
>
> So far, the BioMoby did not use anything from the web services protocol.
> Well, the registry generated WSDL but this WSDL was not that useful.  
> Which
> lead me recently to the idea that the new BioMoby (sometimes called  
> Moby2)
> may abandon the SOAP completely, and to stick with the REST architecture.
> Mainly because of better future collaboration with the S-Moby (the  
> semantic
> guys in Sante Fe will never accept SOAP - my personal feeling). So now  
> going
> actually closer to the web services standards may again put us further  
> from
> them.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>