BadPopcorn » A Stateful Subtlety

A Stateful Subtlety

Written by Ben on October 26, 2005 |

A post over at the counterpoint blog brings up Stateful Web Services.

After reading it over a few times, I believe the post asserts that:
1. SOA and Web Services lend themselves towards a course-grained API. (Which I think it means WS-*).
2. But user interactions require repetitive low-latency fine-grained interactions.
I believe that the post suggests that the client will interact over the network to a server (Web Service) with a fine-grained API(maybe a proxy that sits in front of a course-grained Web Service).
3. And finally its example of, the “Attaching documents to a webmail requires a temporary creation of a resource on the server.” that can be used to achieve fine-grained access. This is used to claim: “statefulness is a necessary evil, but it is mitigated by the service providing a fool-proof interaction sequence.”

I am not opposed to the creation of temporary resources, nor do I have a position on fine-grained vs course-grained.

But, let me suggest that state isn’t something that needs to be stored and managed by the service. Rather, state is just a snapshot of the resources found on the server. A very subtle distinction. And yes, I am suggesting REST.

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