RE: Stateful Web Services...

Dear David,

[snip]

> 
> Scalability is also impacted by the frequency of interactions, whether
> the load on a component is distributed evenly over time or occurs in
> peaks, whether an interaction requires guaranteed delivery or a
> best-effort, whether a request involves synchronous or asynchronous
> handling, and whether the environment is controlled or anarchic (i.e.,
> can you trust the other components?)."
> 


Thanks for the definition. It's really interesting.

> Roy specifically talks about scalability being affected by a variety
of
> aspects of the interaction patterns.  Which he has done in a far
better
> way than I have.  Notice he particularly says that the location of
> application state and extent of distribution affects scalability.  He
> does not say that stateless services are always the best.  It's the
old
> engineering answer, "it depends".
> 

Please allow me to understand your argument. Are you suggesting that
given a choice to realise an architecture of a large-scale, distributed
system using either stateless or stateful interactions there is a chance
that the choice of the latter would be better? I guess I have difficulty
understanding how having to deal with the explicit management of state
(e.g. distributed garbage collection, concurrency, breaking references,
dependence on remote state through references, etc.) can help
scalability.

Regards,
.savas.