On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Fabio Forno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > While it's true that in SOAP+XMPP specs there is no asynchronous > message exchange pattern (and that was a mistake, though I think it's > possible to add a new MEP), this is not related to REST. Neither the > concept of session id is somewhat related to REST, at the contrary, > REST explicitly forbids things like session ids.
Fabio, thank you for catching this misqualification. We'll fix this shortly. BTW, let me say that asynchronous RPC support in XMPP is very interesting for scientific workflow environments. This proposal addresses two problems which are important limitations of current approaches like SOAP over HTTP. 1. many different data types. This is particularly a problem in (bio-)chemical sciences, where experimental data is found in many, many data types, which, moreover, are increasingly semantic. Currently, SOAP often cannot validate input unless the call has been made, while this proposal promises to allow to do this at the gate. Big improvement. 2. asynchronise calls. This is also a big limitation of our current tools. Call-by-reference does solve the problem of HTTP time outs on intermediate IP packet routers, but the only way to do long running jobs is to have the client use a second 'service' to poll the primary service and ask if it is done yet. XMPP is provides a much nicer protocol for such situations, and this proposal formalizes this. These two items combined, make this proposal an excellent candidate for running webservices in sciences like chemistry and biology. I am not too much into XMPP myself, but hope the discussions on this mailing list will help us get the proposal in shape, because we really like to see this functionality. The example code from Johannes looks great, and eager to start using it. We are setting up webservices for metabolomics, where the data that needs to be passed around goes in the gigabytes, and where processing easily goes into the tens of minutes. I am aware that we continue the unofficial extension of Edrin, but having this as an official XEP will make it much easier to roll out XMPP-based webservices on a larger scale. Looking forward to hearing further comments! Egon -- ---- Post-doc in Metabolomics Wageningen Universtity & Research Center, The Netherlands http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
