mark nottingham

Web Services

The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly

Friday, 4 July 2008

Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list:

SOA Jumps Shark

Monday, 4 December 2006

Uche calls it;

Does the Enterprise (Vendor) Get the Web?

Friday, 13 October 2006

A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job;

Some Questions for Software Vendors

Wednesday, 13 September 2006

Everyone seems to be gushing about Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. While any headway is good in the horrible landscape that is Intellectual Property, my initial reaction is that it — like most such vendor promises — is too little, too late.

Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services

Thursday, 25 May 2006

When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication using HTTP; SOAP isn’t assumed (or preferred).

Yaron Uncloaks!

Thursday, 11 May 2006

Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down);

Vendor-pires

Wednesday, 10 May 2006

Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*;

Another WS-*

Friday, 14 April 2006

A friend in the trenches put me on to the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?

Friday, 7 April 2006

It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering extensibility is through URI-based namespaces, along with a flag to tell consumers when an extension needs to be understood (a.k.a. mustUnderstand).

What good is SOAP to HTTP?

Thursday, 6 April 2006

I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible with HTTP.

Don’s False Choice

Monday, 20 March 2006

True to form, Don’s using his witty charm and good looks (such as they are ;) to shape discussion of a topic… in this case, REST, where he splits the RESTifarian world into two; “hi” and “lo.”

WS-Transfer, WAKA and the Web

Wednesday, 15 March 2006

Microsoft and friends (of the keep your enemy closer variety, I suspect) have submitted WS-Transfer to the W3C. I found the Team comment interesting; e.g.,

REST vs..?

Monday, 7 November 2005

More and more people are getting turned on to the advantages of using REST as a higher-level abstraction for networked applications, often comparing it favourably to SOAP and Web services.

HTTP Performance (again)

Monday, 8 August 2005

Some folks at IONA have written a paper entitled Where HTTP Fails SOAP. I had a chance to look at this before I got it published, and their conclusions make a lot of sense — if you accept the premise that SOAP (and Web services) is about integration with existing applications.

One Description to Bind them All? Nah.

Friday, 8 July 2005

You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art — develop specialised jargon as a shorthand for concepts that are well-understood in that field. It gives greater precision, easier flow of ideas, and yes, it raises the bar to entry for newcomers.

Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment

Monday, 27 June 2005

I don’t talk much about it here, but I’m honoured to be the Chair of the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. This is something of an experiment for the W3C, so I gave an update on its progress as part of a panel discussion at the Advisory Committee meeting a few weeks ago. I’d like to share some of what I presented there.

The Map is Not the Territory

Monday, 7 February 2005

Werner makes an excellent point;

WS-Who's on First?

Sunday, 23 January 2005

There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL; both describe patterns of messages, but at potentially different layers.

Melbourne

Wednesday, 5 January 2005

Since the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group is visiting my (sort of) home town in a couple of weeks, I’ve updated the Opinionated Guide to Melbourne that I sometimes give to people by e-mail and put it on the Web.

Why POST is Special

Sunday, 10 October 2004

In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer:

Is there a Web Services Architecture?

Wednesday, 29 September 2004

As I’m sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published their idea of an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications the other week.

The ‘Web’ in Web Services

Monday, 27 September 2004

I was very interested to see the reaction to WS-Transfer [PDF] over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (see previous discussion), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying “aha.”

The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging

Thursday, 5 August 2004

(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”)

Come One, Come All

Thursday, 1 July 2004

The W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services promises to be a quiet, calm, tightly-scoped discussion of a well-understood topic, lacking any controversy whatsoever.

SOAP: Protocol or Format?

Wednesday, 30 June 2004

Way back when the XML Protocol Working Group started kicking around, Henrik and I had a long-running, low-level “discusssion” about whether SOAP was a protocol or a format.

XopParser.py 0.2

Friday, 7 May 2004

To help inform discussion of XOP (and to save Sam the trouble ;), I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty (we’re talking two hours) XOP parser in Python. It isn’t particularly efficient, nor is it well-tested or robust; it’s only to demonstrate how a XOP parser might behave.

How do we use SOAP Headers?

Tuesday, 27 April 2004

Way back when in the XML Protocol Working Group, one of the concerns that came up was the processing model for SOAP headers. In particular, while SOAP 1.2 does a good job of specifying how that model operates, a key peice of information is missing; how to order the steps in processing a message.

Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL

Friday, 16 April 2004

To use WSDL to describe RESTful interactions, you need some way of accommodating generative resource identifiers. In a nutshell, this means some part of the URI is dynamic. For example, with HTTP I might describe an address book where someone named “Jones” has a corresponding entry URI;

A(nother) Description Format for REST

Wednesday, 14 April 2004

I’ve talked before about describing RESTful Web resources, going as far as prototyping a new format. That work was predicated on the assumption that WSDL wasn’t adequate.

XOP and MTOM

Saturday, 14 February 2004

The XML Protocol Working Group (of which I’m a member) has released a first draft of XOP, XML-binary Optimised Packaging, and a revised draft of MTOM, the Message Transmission Optimisation Mechanism, that leverages XOP.

DIME is dead.

Thursday, 30 October 2003

‘cause Gudge says so, and as we all know, Gudge is always right.

Web Services

Monday, 18 August 2003

If you’re lost in a sea of specs, pundits and opinions, might I suggest two very well-written, thoughtful papers:

SOAP1.2

Tuesday, 24 June 2003

We finally did it. More than two years ago, I went to North Carolina almost by accident; at the last minute I asked David Fallside if I could come to the first meeting because it sounded “interesting.”

Conneg based on XML Dialect

Thursday, 8 May 2003

I know at least one person who will think that this is a good idea. Anybody else? I’d looove to do this work…