A RESTful Approach to the OGSA Basic Execution Service Specification

The OGSA-basic execution service (BES) specification has recently been proposed by the Open Grid Forum (OGF) as the standard job submission and management interface across different Grid middlewares. This specification defines a Web Service interface in terms of a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document for creating, monitoring and managing computational jobs (called activities), and for querying the capabilities of the BES service itself. In this paper, we propose an alternate incarnation of the BES functionalities according to the representational state transfer (REST) architectural style. We describe the mapping of the BES operations in terms of HTTP actions on resources. We compare the REST formulation of BES with the standard WS-based one. We show that all BES operations can be expressed in a very natural way using the standard HTTP protocol and following the REST approach; moreover, we present useful extensions that are expected to appear in the near future.