Tuesday, February 03, 2004

'Pass by Reference' in web services

I've been looking into my options for providing 'pass by reference' capability in web services. I know, I know - PBR is the root of all evil in loose coupling. But it is also the performance enabler for many applications. Thus, the goal is to identify the best mechanism that enables loose coupling while still providing performance.

My initial quest took me down a road that I'm calling "Pass By RESTference". I ran the concept by the smart guys on the Yahoo SOA group and it didn't get nuked (which is good in that group). The next issue is, how do you do it? Well, the closest example I've seen is probably this:
http://wiki.astrogrid.org/bin/view/Astrogrid/RestStyleWebServices

I'm going to chase down a couple other items... it has been rumored that WS-EndpointReference has something to say about this problem. In addition, I'm hearing that the OGSA guys have an alternative answer. More to report later.

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