UWS 1.1 approved!

UWS stands for Universal Worker Service and is an IVOA standard provides a protocol which can be used for accessing databases and other web services from the command line, e.g. using the python uws-client. This allows to create (asynchronous) jobs for a web service (e.g. an SQL query), check their status, retrieve their results, abort or delete them.

The updated version 1.1 was approved at the InterOperability Meeting last week and brings some nice new features:

• Job list filtering: When retrieving the job list, one can now retrieve only jobs created after a certain date, the latest n jobs or jobs with a certain phase (e.g. EXECUTING or COMPLETED)
• WAIT: When asking for job details, it is now possible to append a WAIT parameter and provide an integer as wait-time in seconds. This means that the job details will only be returned when the wait-time is over or the job's phase has changed, whichever comes first.

For all the details, have a look at the standard itself: UWS 1.1 Recommendation.

A few examples using the CosmoSim database are given here: UWS tutorial for CosmoSim (pdf), using 1.0 and UWS 1.1 update at CosmoSim.

And if you want to implement UWS 1.1 for your own service, here is a test-tool that may be useful for validating for you for validating the new features: uws-validator.