WSRF

WSRF stands for Web Service Resource Framework. (See Web Services.) It's a standard defined in 2004 by the Globus Alliance ([1]), IBM, and others.

A Web Service by itself is stateless, i.e. each time it is invoked by a client it starts from a blank slate, with no memory of any previous invocation. This rather limits the things that you can do with a web service, although people have worked around it by having the web service read from a database, etc.

In WSRF each service has an associated "resource" object which the programmer can use to store variables to be read during another invocation. Also, the service can create a new resource instance for each client, so that multiple clients don't step on each other's data.

The Globus Toolkit version 4 contains Java and C implementations of WSRF, and many of the other Globus tools have been rebuilt around it.