In a State of REST

In catching up on <savas:weblog /> this morning, I came across his post about a paper by Ian Foster (well, Savas is a little humble here; he claims it's by Dr. Foster, then later owns up to the fact that he's a co-author). The paper is about modeling state for web services.

It's very serendipitous, because I had a potential customer walk in the booth and ask me a question about this very thing. They have an app they've written that has a web-service interface. It's (sometimes, at least) a very compute intensive application. They'd like to be able to scale it fairly widely, and they'd like to take advantage of idle resources. Their concern is about state.

I haven't had time to read the paper in-depth yet--getting ready for another day at the PDC05. I'm looking forward to it, though. Dr. Foster is one of the world leaders in this field; I can always benefit from reading what he has to say.