Web Services Resource Framework

Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) is a family of OASIS-published specifications for web services. Major contributors include the Globus Alliance and IBM.

A web service by itself is nominally stateless, i.e., it retains no data between invocations. This limits the things that can be done with web services,

Before WSRF, no standard in the Web Services family of specifications explicitly defined how to deal with stateful interactions with remote resources. This does not mean that web services could not be stateful. Where required a web service could read from a database, or use session state by way of cookies or WS-Session.

WSRF provides a set of operations that web services can use to implement stateful interaction; web service clients communicate with resource services which allow data to be stored and retrieved. When clients talk to the web service they include the identifier of the specific resource that should be used inside the request, encapsulated within the WS-Addressing endpoint reference. This may be a simple URI address, or it may be complex XML content that helps identify or even fully describe the specific resource in question.

Alongside the notion of an explicit resource reference comes a standardized set of web service operations to get/set resource properties. These can be used to read and perhaps write resource state, in a manner somewhat similar to having member variables of an object alongside its methods. The primary beneficiary of such a model are management tools, which can enumerate and view resources, even if they have no other knowledge of them. This is the basis for WSDM.

WSRF is not without controversy. Most fundamental is architectural: are distributed objects with state and operations the best way to represent remote resources? It is almost a port into XML of the distributed objects pattern, of which CORBA and DCOM are examples. A WSRF resource may be a stateful entity to which multiple clients have resource references and the WSRF specification itself does not deal with concerns such as isolation and availability, deferring to the composable nature of web service specifications to deal with these. Many WSRF stacks appear to avoid these concerns by being low-availability, mapping 1:1 from a WSRF resource reference to a local object instance, which in C++ and Java is usually not at all persistent (with the exception of those bound to a database through some persistence mechanism). There are, however, implementations of WSRF that support persistence, clustering and high-availability of resources (for example, in WebSphere Application Server).

...
Wikipedia