[MOBY-dev] BioMOBY Asynchronous Service Call Proposal v2.2 - Politics

[Pieter Neerincx]

Hi,

I'm lost; I honestly don't know who to agree with on this one. What  
impact exactly do the political statements below have on the BioMOBY  
Async Services proposal? Is WSRF bad? If so, do we have an  
alternative that actually works today (Ok, maybe tomorrow, but at  
least soon). If we can polish the proposal a little and make it  
forward compatible with BioMOBY 2.0 that would be great, but unless  
we see a proposal for that popping up in the next week, I suggest we  
save the politics for a discussion about BioMOBY 2.0 during a future  
meeting and start using standardised asynchronous services a.s.a.p.

The thing I like most about BioMOBY is that it actually works for me  
today even though the API hasn't reached a 1.0 status yet :).

Just my € 0,02

Pi

On 26-Aug-2006, at 6:12 PM, Tom Oinn wrote:

> Mark Wilkinson wrote:
>> 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 :-)
>
> One thing to consider here is that you're potentially missing out  
> on the
> additional capabilities you can inherit from a web service platform. I
> tend to agree with both you and Martin on this (Martin has sat next to
> me in an office for some years and so should know my generally low
> opinion of the current state of the web service world!).
>
> Where WS can really come into their own is their ability to add  
> aspects
> such as security and robust message transport without any additional
> effort from the MOBY community. It might be worth taking a look at the
> work we've been doing with OMII-UK (the umbrella organization in  
> the UK
> which has in the last year absorbed both myGrid and OGSA-DAI). They
> (we?) have a container configuration with support for WS-Security
> (certificate based authentication) and will support its use in  
> escience
> projects.
>
> Use of WS 'standards' incurs a cost, both in initial development time
> and in runtime complexity. It potentially reaps a benefit if you go on
> to make use of the full suite (or a substantial subset) of additional
> capabilities such as security, WSRF style session management, full
> message description and the like. Before dropping WS invocation  
> support
> entirely you need to consider the potential future requirements  
> that it
> might fill more easily than a home grown implementation. There is of
> course always the political aspect - we've already had people say "we
> can't use taverna as, although it works and does what we want, it  
> isn't
> a 'standard'". Sad but true.
>
> This isn't an exclusive choice of course, you could (and maybe should)
> have a simple REST-like invocation interface alongside a more complex
> and potentially extensible SOAP based one.
>
> Just my thoughts,
>
> Tom
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