Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a loose coupling of network services providing methods for systems development and integration. Interoperability between different systems and programming languages is provided via communication protocols and well defined messages. The recent development trend has been to favor RESTful approaches for these interfaces, which encode relevant context and semantic metadata into the URL of an HTTP GET or PUT operation.
We observe that this approach is essentially a simplified web-instantiation of synthetic file system based service interfaces, such as those originally pioneered by UNIX and later the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. In this paper we advocate the collapse of the software stack by abstracting the underlying transport and naming details, and accessing RESTful services via standard file system interfaces. We explore the research challenges and opportunities presented by taking such an approach to building comprehensive dynamic distributed systems appropriate for large scale cloud computing.
By: Eric Van Hensbergen; Noah Evans; Phillip Stanley-Marbell
Published in: RC24788 in 2009
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:
This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.
Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .