[OGSA-BES-WG] A RESTFul HTTP mapping of the BES WSDL

[Donal K. Fellows]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> Could you not employ X.509 client/server authentication at the TLS layer? I
> believe you can access the certificate information when processing the HTTP
> operations. 
> 
> Just wondering....

That sounds like an entirely practical way of doing it to me, especially
as there is rather a lot of in-service experience out there with
handling authentication and authorization for access to HTTP operations.
There might be a few tricky bits of course (notably how to handle
telling the client how to authenticate to the server, though in the
fallback case of username/password all that stuff exists already) but it
still seems quite possible.

I like the idea that the interfaces we define are fundamentally
independent of how they are interacted with. That has the architectural
equivalent of Good Code Smell. :-)

Donal.