Re: [DotGNU]Defining Webservices

[Daniel E Baumann]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2001 at 05:11:27PM +0530, Gopal.V wrote:
> Hi 
>       From all the discussion I have been going over , I get the 
> impression that most guys confuse webservices with webservice 
> components. 
>       A webservice is an abstract term used to denote a network
> transparent , standard protocol service. It may be as simple 
> as a webmail service, but at dotGNU we are more concerned with
> making the tools for producing webservices.
> 
>       A webservice component on the other hand is a well defined
> peice of reusable code which performs a specific service in a 
> network transparent method.

Yes, I agree here and you have made the distinction a lot clearer.
Thanks.
 
>       But following the successful paradigm of *nixes ( and !*nixes), a
> number of peices, which when joined with the right glue, is worth more
> than the sum of its peices, we have to find the right glue as well as
> make the peices according the glue. Pipes,Unix Sockets,TCP,IPC etc form
> the glue in GNU. We have a number of options like XMLRPC,SOAP,WSDL,CORBA
> etc to use as the glue. We have to choose the glue on the basis of the 
> webservice. Since we don't want to lose any quarter to .NET, we have to 
> provide support for maximum interfaces. We have to start with the most 
> popular glues CORBA for local and SOAP for network communication. Since 
> we have ORBIT we have really to strive to integrate SOAP to CORBA.

OK, here I would like to say that we do not have to choose just one. You
see us GEAS hackers (GNUe Application Server) want to be communication
agnostic and support whatever anyone wishes to write a "plugin" for be
it XML-RPC, CORBA, SOAP, etc. and I had some ideas on how we could do
this it would be a generic wrapper library possibly using ODL (superset
of IDL) as the interface description so if you support this interface
you can get whatever method you like just by either using an existing
plugin for whatever ORB or a plugin for say SOAP, etc. I discussed this
idea with a few ppl...I was thinking of calling it GROAN (GNU's Reusable
Object Adaptor Network) or GNU DOG (Distributed Object Glue). Another
thing we are trying to do in GEAS is allow object methods to be
scriptable in whatever language you plz (of course python will be first
as that is our language of choice for a lot of thing in the GNUe
project) and also you can mix and match methods at the class level so
that object methods can even be implemented in different languages for
the same object (might be nice to have some core methods in C for
performance reasons) so this will lead way to a language plugin system.
This is the "middleware" I envision for GEAS and I want to make it
generic enough for dotGNU, bonobo, etc. to use it to be OO commincation
agnostic. Of course there are tons of details to iron out and I have not
had time to throw together a proposal yet (I will be doing this soon I
hope), but this is what I envision as the ultimate "middleware" and also
a nice way to be able to play with newer middleware/communication
technologies. Also for security we were thinking of an RBAC system (Role
Based Access Control), but I am not sure how generic that could be made
or if that would just have to be a GNUe specific thing...then again
maybe this would also help dotGNU and other projects. Anyway, enough
bantering I just thought I would throw that out there.

Dan
-- 
Daniel E Baumann      address@hidden 

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