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AJAX & REA: Article

I Wonder What W3C's Response Will Be To AJAX?

A W3C standard interface definition language for AJAX apps is very much needed!
By Frank Cohen
Article Rating:
September 6, 2007 11:45 PM EDT
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 10,861

Frank Cohen's Blog

The W3C has moved the Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) to recommendation status which makes it a new standard.

I'm feeling really stupid about now. I'm trying to think of an occasion where I would use SWSL and SWSO? They both seem like small steps between what we have now in WS-* and the computer on Star Trek Next Generation being able to answer the question What is the nature of the universe?. In my opinion the Web Service standards glorify the request/response pairing found in HTTP. In HTTP (and the WS-*) interactions I don't have any semantical knowledge of the nature of the request or the meaning of the response. Perhaps SWSL and SWSO move us a little bit closer to semantic meaning.

I am wondering then what comes after SWSL and SWSO? Perhaps a roadmap of W3C future specs is needed to eventually get a semantically valid and comprehensive answer like "The universe is a spheroid 705 meters in diameter" and to understand that a spheroid is different than a Google result set.

In the meantime I wonder what W3C's response will be to AJAX? In my experience there is a whole lot more request/response pattern usage in AJAX apps that are now in production than SOAP. A W3C standard interface definition language for AJAX apps is very much needed!

Published September 6, 2007 – Reads 10,861
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Frank Cohen is the leading authority for testing and optimizing software developed with service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web service designs. He is CEO and Founder of PushToTest and inventor of TestMaker, the open source SOA test automation tool, that helps software developers, QA technicians, and IT managers understand and optimize the scalability, performance, and reliability of their systems.

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Most Recent Comments
Karl Dubost, W3C 09/14/07 04:28:25 PM EDT

Hi Frank,

Ajax is a principle of design involving a few technologies. The W3C DOM (Document Object Model) has been standardized for a very long time and is one of the bricks of Ajax. If you are wondering specifically about XMLHttpRequest. The last working draft has been published on 18 June 2007.

http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/

The first draft has been started a while ago, in 2006.
Which other components do you think should be standardized?
Eric Neumann 09/06/07 09:12:05 AM EDT

One example of AJAX being used in the Semantic Web context is Tabulator (http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab), a project that Tim Berners-Lee is managing.

-Eric
co-chair, W3C Healthcare and Life Sciences Interest Group