[AG-TECH] AccessGrid 3: What information is available

[John Hodrien]

On Tue, 24 May 2005, Ivan R.Judson wrote:

> Hey John,
>
> Good point. Although my skepticism keeps nagging with the worry, "Why bother
> with WSRF/GT4 services, aren't Web Services good enough?"  I suspect they
> are, I haven't seen any significant value to the layers above that provided
> by GT4.

If you try and ignore the globus stuff, and think of it as WSRF it becomes
more pleasant.  GT4 contains lots of crap for submitting jobs and managing
resources, copying files about etc.  I have no immediate interest in any of
that.  WSRF is the OASIS working draft for stateful web services, and as such
is intended to be something nice and generic, usable whenever you want state
in a web service.

The most important part of it as I'm concerned (if you were entertaining the
notion of AG with web services) would be WS-Resource and WS-Notifications.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrf/2005/03/wsrf-WS-Resource-1.2-draft-03.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsn/2004/06/wsn-WS-BaseNotification-1.2-draft-03.pdf

Sadly you can quickly complicate things, as you're likely to need
WS-Reliability if you're going down the notifications road.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrm

I'm not sure what else would be worth poking at, bits like WS-ResourceLifetime
might also deserve a look in.

Equally, playing with WS-Security and using the SAML callout would let you
define whatever you wanted on the security front, and make it open and
standardised how you were doing it.

These are all boxes of tricks that live independently of GT4 (WSRF.NET for
example) but would open up the AG to open and standard interaction with other
software.

So really my case for this isn't in favour of GT4, it's in favour of
standardised (very nearly at least ;) stateful web services.

> Did I miss something :-)?

I'm sure we've all missed plenty ;)

jh

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