RESTful Web services and DAL

[Doug Tody]

For the DAL interfaces, the HTTP interface is mandatory and the SOAP
interface (if eventually we specify these) is optional.  The common
object model we currently have makes it possible to bind the service
interface to either protocol.  I would like to see how far we can
go towards integrating grid capabilities with an HTTP interface.
It may be possible to do this for the current stateless portions of
the interface, but have a more REST-like approach for the stateful
service bits such as posting a stageData request and then querying
the state of a long running operation.  This stateful bit seems to be
the part which fits most closely to the REST model, e.g., a service
jobId is similar to a PID as in the /proc analogy.  - Doug



On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Matthew Graham wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Doug Tody wrote:
>> This is my view as well; the full REST model does not seem to work very
>> well for a service with complex operations involving many parameters.
> Hmm, maybe REST is not the answer and we should stick with SOAP.
>
>   Cheers,
>
>   Matthew
>