

RE: open transport protocol for aysnc web services?

From: Nick Nadgauda <nick@invertica.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 10:13:15 -0400
To: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
Cc: <www-ws@w3.org>
Nothing's wrong with HTTP.  I don't think there's anything inherently
limiting in the protocol that limits the running event-driven applications
and services on top of it.  I was making a slightly different point however.

If you take a look at the world of synchronous web services, there is no
need for custom endpoint adapters.  A .NET client can theoretically talk to
a Weblogic web service with no problem -- and more importantly with no
adapters at either end.  This is just the nature of standards.  If both
clients and servers conform to a spec, everything works together (for the
most part).  Now if you look at the async world, no such interoperability
exists.  I can't, without installing a set of adapters, do pub/sub between
two different vendors' endpoints.  My goal is to get rid of adapters.  I
want all publishers, messaging providers, and subscribers to speak a common
format the way everything speaks HTTP.

If I understand their products correctly, what KnowNow, Kenamea, and Bang
Networks have basically done is build a tunnel over HTTP.  They've defined a
new closed "protocol" -- in this case the protocol being "use 2 HTTP
connections, one to send and one to receive, and keep the receive one
constantly open".  This works great because they control both ends of the
connection.  Unless other vendors (publishers and subscribers alike) adopt
this "protocol", you won't have true inter-vendor interoperability the way
you will with synchronous web services.  Kind of like I can't assume that
everything speaks Tibco or Vitria.

The way I see it, there are three ways for inter-vendor async interop to
work out.

	1. Everyone adopts a low level async protocol.  This might be something
like BEEP and it might take years for vendors to buy in, but it might work

	2. KnowNow, Kenemea, & Bang agree to interoperate and standardize their
technology.  If other vendors go for it, this might be a good way to go.

	3. Everything starts speaking something like JMS (and so far only the
message bus providers do.  The endpoints unless they're J2EE apps do not)
and someone does JMS over KnowNow/Kenemea/Bang.


-----Original Message-----
Mark Baker
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 10:00 PM
To: nick@invertica.com
Cc: www-ws@w3.org
Subject: Re: open transport protocol for aysnc web services?

Nick Nadgauda wrote:
> There's also a few open protocol possiblities (again that I know of)
> including the Jabber as Middleware effort (jam.jabber.org) which aims to
> provide a messaging transport over Jabber's XML on IM backbone.  Anyone
> of any (other?) efforts going on in this area?

What's wrong with HTTP?  Have you seen what KnowNow is doing with it?
It seems to be about what you're looking for.  Check out;


Received on Monday, 9 July 2001 10:14:17 GMT
