[uf-discuss] microservices

[Gustavo]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your answer. Comments inline.

Tom Morris wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Gustavo Garcia Bernardo <ggb at tid.es> wrote:
>>  I was wondering how a web application could publish the support to offer a service for a type of microformat (i.e. hotmail could publish support to add hCards to your agenda and gmaps support to show a geo or addr in a map).
>>
>>  Something like IE8 Activities (Microsoft  openservice specification) but oriented to microformats (microservices/microactivities).
>>
> 
> I'm not sure there is a compelling need for them at the moment.
> Currently if you want to implement a service, you can quite easily
> write an Operator plugin. 

Operator plugins are great but AFAIK they don't follow any standard.  I 
was interested in standard approaches.

> Often data from the Web (including
> microformatted data) will need pre-processing before submitting to a
> service - which would seem to make coming up with a 'service
> specification' both difficult and impractical. 
I don't know why that preprocessing couldn't be specified in the 
"microservice" specification.

> The approach of
> specifying a 'web service' language has been fraught with difficulties
> - as the current trend towards RESTful services instead of Web
> Services Architecture shows.
A RESTful service is a Web Service from my perspective, I didn't mean SOAP.

> 
> It would be a good idea to collect alongside microformats and other
> formats on the Web (whether embedded in markup or in other formats)
> possible services which they are, could or should be compatible with.
> If there is a common set of patterns between them, then perhaps it
> would be appropriate to standardise them in some way.

I don't know why you ned a common set of patterns.  You would just need 
a way for a service to specify that it can be invoked in context X 
(microformat/format X) and with the parameters a,b,c (that could be 
fields of that microformat X.a, X.b, X.c).

> I may be wrong - in which case, it's probably a good idea if we see if
> Microsoft's OpenService stuff gets implemented anywhere outside of
> Internet Explorer 8.

Hopefully it will be.

BR,
G.

> --
> Tom Morris
> http://tommorris.org/
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