I just posted a lengthy post to my blog discussing the challenges associated with achieving web services location transparency. I plan to post another entry shortly on the topic of using intelligent intermediaries to address this issue.

Mark

Achieving Web Services Location Transparency - Part 2 posted.

Mark,
Great posts, thanks. I’m wondering though, about something I heard in a webMethods Fabric webinar a while back. The idea was put forward that at some point webMethods would be integrating Fabric with the Broker in order to allow Web Service location transparency via pub/sub. Now I haven’t thought through that much, but even before the webinar it seemed to me that this approach might hold lots of potential, so I was especially intrigued when that plan was discussed. Do you have any thoughts on the pros/cons of such a beast, or know anything more about webMethods take on it?

My take is that integration between Fabric and Broker would be provided primarily to support standards such as WS-Reliable Messaging and some merged combination of WS-Eventing and WS-Notification.

I’m not sure that integration with Broker by itself does much to help with location transparency, but I might be missing something obvious.

I do see several similarities between the functions of an “intelligent intermediary” such as Fabric and the functions performed by webMethods Broker. In essence, the job of both is to be a high-speed software message switch that maintains meta-data about consumers / broker clients and producers (more broker clients).

Mark