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Is web services orchestration a new class of problem?
I agree with the RESTian argument that SOAP-accessible web services should support HTTP GET where appropriate. The notion is that this will help ensure low coordination costs both for person-to-machine as well as machine-to-machine communication.
In TAG Finding: URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET, Dan Connolly sums up the recommendation that resources be made URI-addressable where possible, and dispels two myths that have clouded the issue:
- Myth: Search services will not index anything with a "?" in the URI.
- This was a heuristic to avoid infinite loops in some search service crawlers, but it was not an architectural constraint, and modern search services use more sophisticated heuristics to avoid loops.
- Myth: URIs cannot be longer than 256 characters
- This was a limitation in some server implementations, and while servers continue to have limitations to prevent denial-of-service attacks, they are generally at least 4000 characters, and they evolve as the legitimate uses of application developers evolve.
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How this relates to the orchestration of web services is still very unclear though. Consider this remark on the TAG mailing list, from Edwin Khodabakchian, CEO of Collaxa:
- we need to acknowledge the fact that we are solving a new class of problem that is more about machine-to-machine communication
Perhaps this really is a new class of problem, but if so I would like to see spelled out more clearly exactly how and why that is so, and what it implies.
11:47:56 AM 
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