Wednesday, April 16, 2008

12 things about REST and WOA



This blog entry from Dion Hichcliffe introduces the following diagram:





(BTW: this guy produces tons of excellent drawings)

Interesting to see that in the Service-oriented Era the relative position of the Data block is not clear.

In the Web-oriented Era, the Data block explodes into a constellation of inter-connected "resources", which we can see as Data Services, can't we? So Data Services Platforms (like Xcalia DAS) are at the heart of that constellation.

High-level services are combined (orchestrated together) to build processes. These coarse-grained services are themselves consuming Data Services. There is an exponential number of possible combinations of Data Services. It is almost impossible to discover which of these combinations are relevant and to maintain them in time as business is changing. That's why it is so important to have technologies to automate these combinations (see papers from IBM's Ali Arsanjani for instance): the GOOD method and Manners.

If the technology is able to combine Data Services dynamically, at runtime, it also becomes possible to select the best combination at any time based on cost metadata. That's like the Semantic Web but applied to Data Access.

That's exactly what the dynamic composition of Xcalia intermediation (XIC) is doing. See also that presentationto better understand the technology and metadata behind the dynamic composition of data services.

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