[topicmapmail] Web Services

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Thomas Schwotzer
| 
| I think, different API are required for different purposes.

Definitely!

| If you want manipulate TM objects (from remote), an API like TMAPI,
| TM4J API or of course Ontopias API should be used.

These are probably not very suitable for remote access, even if they
can easily be exposed via RMI (or even CORBA), simply because they are
very fine-grained. You have to make a large number of method calls to
do anything, and with RMI/CORBA (or even the SOAP/HTTP equivalent) you
would have too much network traffic for this to be effective.

I think something like SNAPI is far better for remote access, simply
because it allows you to perform coarser-grained operations, thus
reducing the network traffic to achieve the same effect.

| Other application classes don't need such a fine grained access and
| don't need transactions. Some applications might wish to access a
| Topic Map like a Web Site. They ask for some information and get a
| Topic Map fragment in return. SNAPI shall become such an API.  It is
| supposed to be a kind of HTTP e.g. for Topic Maps. There are no
| transactions and also no way to access a particular topic.  XTM
| fragments can be exchanged. Advantage: Light-weight implementations.

I think probably this is the only realistic approach. In some cases
you will want to have transactions or similar guarantees for this type
of access, too, but there are ways to deal with that.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >