Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Nothing New, Again
In my first "Nothing New" post, I mentioned several areas of continuing development. Two of them, which I will refer to as "alternate contact" and "service specification", might just have a common solution.
The weakness of asynchronous specification appears to be managed quite well by BPEL4WS. Further, bringing BPEL into the picture also allows the specification of alternate contact means, such as telephone. By expanding the number of contact points available, the reliability of the protocol is improved; for a successful compromise to continue, the interceptor would have to have access to each available access point.
As mentioned earlier, it is entirely possible to have more than one set of parameters in the initiation request allowing for the possibility of such specifications as "for any transaction over $250, verify key with trust agent", "every 7th request, use the alternate method...", "every day inform me of the number of requests received by alternate method...", etc. Such rich semantics allows for arbitrarily complex protocols to be developed based on agreement.
Placing the BPEL specifications inside of a larger business process could be used to provide a context in which the service provides value, in effect describing a "suggested use" that could be used by tools such as Microsoft's BizTalk Server to quickly build a prototypical implementation.
Well, that's enough for now. This is interesting stuff, at least to me. I'm sure I will have something more to say in the future. 'Til then....
