On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Alasdair Allan wrote:
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Quite. I never expected to deploy dynamic grid services where stateless web services would do the whole job. I've been expecting to have a mixed architecture with some OGSI services (e.g. AstroGrid mySpace) amongst ordinary web-services.
Recently, I'm beginning to wonder if OGSI is worth the bother. Here in Java land, we're stuck with GT3 as the only implementation, which makes development slow and difficult. Parastatidis et al. have questioned the usefulness of OGSI as a standard, proposing an alternative that matches better to web services standards. If we don't do OGSI now, I'm wondering if it will have become obsolete by the time we need to exploit it.
AstroGrid's new tack is to be able to use OGSI services at the bottom of the architecure, mainly as data-selection services. E.g., we want to be able to talk, via some gateway to be designed in detail next month, to an OGSA-DAI instance as if it were one of the catalogue services in our data-access layer. (Which is not yet the IVOA DAL, BTW.) This puts us in the position of wrapping grid services inside advanced web services. We probably won't be using OGSI at critical locations elsewhere in the architecture.
Guy Rixon gtr-at-ast.cam.ac.uk Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523Received on 2003-10-06Z08:43:17