[MOBY-dev] [moby] Re: RFC #1941 Asynchronous Service Call Proposal

[Mark Wilkinson]

I just had a look at the WSRF proposal - it's a very young
"standard" (or as Tom puts it, a very young "relatively standard
technology"), but it's interesting and looks like it does a lot of what
we need.

It's surprisingly lightweight.  It uses the SOAP Header to pass the
state information, and thus would not require any changes to the MOBY
Messaging structure (which is nice!).  What is going to be slightly
tricky for us, however, is that the Schema for the service-specific
state information is contained in the WSDL file, and that file is
created by MOBY Central.  We would either have to extend MOBY Central to
capture this information at registration, or we would have to agree on a
standard set of XML tags that all stateful MOBY services would agree to
use that we could then add into the default WSDL document template.  I
suspect that the latter would be the way we want to go, since we are
already talking about creating standard objects.  WSRF also has explicit
support for things like "clean" that we have been talking about in this
thread to destroy the server-side resources.  It also has some
standardized fault codes that are (apparently?) extensible such that we
could report things like progress or Estimated-time-to-completion.

I agree with Tom - much of what we are discussing here is dealt with by
the WSRF spec.  (thanks for the heads-up Tom!). 

I wonder if the authors of RFC1941 could browse the WSRF spec and see if
they agree that it is useful, and if so, revise the proposal
accordingly?

M



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Mark Wilkinson
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University of British Columbia
PI in Bioinformatics
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