WS-Arch Usage Scenario S001: Fire and Forget, Single Receiver

Here are my comments on this scenario:

This is the very simplest scenario possible. The SOAP Sender sends a 
message which is not acknowledged (either positively or negatively). As 
a result, this scenario contains nothing involving internationalization 
directly.

The scenario as written contains one poor example of i18n: a "price" 
that consists of a floating point numeric value and no currency:

     <r:StockPriceUpdate xmlns:r="http://example.org/2001/06/quotes">
       <r:Symbol>BigCo</r:Symbol>
       <r:Price>34.5</r:Price>
     </r:StockPriceUpdate>

This pattern's usefulness would seem to be in servicing subscribers to 
information that changes periodically, as in the stock quote example. If 
I subscribe to a stock quote, I might get regularly scheduled updates or 
updates when certain thresholds that I set are met. I can visualize 
setting the settings using a Web site and then having, say, my cell 
phone sent SOAP documents containing the updates from time to time. A 
"stock ticker" application might use this mechanism as well.

The point of using this pattern is that the SOAP Sender doesn't want to 
receive or process responses. If the recipient dies, goes on vacation, 
is off, has a problem and so forth, the server doesn't need to do 
anything. It just blindly keeps sending messages to the full list of 
subscribers.

There could be internationalization ramifications to the use of such a 
service. If text is sent, then the language of the text must be 
negotiated out of band. Similarly, other contextual information must be 
used to provide formatting or specialized data handling affected by 
cultural conventions. The main point here is that the sending 
application (and its designer) is solely responsible for the 
implementation decisions here.

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Comments?

Addison

-- 
Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods, Inc.

+1 408.962.5487  mailto:aphillips@webmethods.com
-------------------------------------------
Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.

Chair, W3C I18N WG Web Services Task Force
http://www.w3.org/International/ws

Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 12:31:57 UTC