Some consideration around the UWS bindings

[Carlo Maria Zwölf]

Dear all,

I take the opportunity of holidays for writing some ideas I shared with Paul during the last Interop. 

In the actual UWS recommendation (paragraph 2.2) only a rest binding is described. It is however said that other bindings, as SOAP, may appear in further versions. 

If I remember correctly, a SOAP binding was provided in the earlier version (draft?) of the UWS document. However with time SOAP has gone out of fashion.
Since Rest is not a protocol or a format, but is an architecture design based on resources, it should suffer less from the effects of fashion.

I think that an alternate binding should be based on an alternate architecture (again, not on protocols or format):  the architecture oriented/based on functions. 

We may define the functions for handling the job lifecycle (e.g. creating a job, getting its description, etc.)  by specifying what are the information that the user has to provide to these functions, while remaining agnostic about the mechanism that developers will use for implementing those functionalities. They could use  SOAP, XML-RPC,  Servlets, etc.

The mapping between the REST and the function-based architecture should be easy. We just need to reproduce with functions the features summarized in the table contained into the paragraph 2.2.1 of the UWS recommendation. 

I don’t know it is worthwhile to carry out this work for the next UWS-1.1 version, but I think this could be something to take into account for the future UWS 2.0 version. 

What do you think of this proposal?

Regards,

Carlo Maria.

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