RE: There is no spoon Neo

 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Orchard [mailto:dorchard@bea.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 2:49 PM
To: 'Newcomer, Eric'; 'Anne Thomas Manes'; 'Katia Sycara'; 'Christopher B
Ferris'
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: There is no spoon Neo


 
However, Web services have this problem of needing to talk about equivalence
of endpoints with different bindings.  The web didn't really have this
problem as we rarely create two different URIs, like smtp:foo and http:bar,
that are equivalent endpoints.  
 
Now we want to talk about the ultimatereceiver, so that we can say that
endpoints are equivalent interfaces to the ultimatereceiver, yet we know
that we can't say really anything about the ultimatereceiver as it's not
visible.
 
This problem is exactly why I wanted the WSD group to change some of the
definitions.  I suggested endpoint -> web service and service -> web service
collection.  So a web service is an individual endpoint identified by a URI,
ie a Web service=Resource.  Now we've got this wierd situation where a web
service is this collection of resources, so how do we say what a web service
is without getting abstract? 
 

Yup, this is good and gnarly.  WSD seems to be having fun untangling it.
And it's entangled with some of our favorite trout, such as "what is a Web
service?" ... "is the 'service' the interface to the Ultimatereceiver
[thanks for the term Dave!] or is it the Ultimatereceiver itself?".   And
it's entangled with the TAG's Mother of Trout, the URN vs dereferenceable
URI issue.
 
I [personally] think that we can't avoid getting abstract.  An
Ultimatereceiver is obviously a concrete piece of software (of arbitrary
complexity). As far as WSA is concerned, however, it's a Resource in the
webarch sense of something that has a label but is not really "visible"
except via representation transfer (in the Webarch) and WS invocation (in
SOA). 
 
So for WSA and possibly WSD, I'm thinking of the Ultimatereceiver has having
a URN (it's a concept with unique identity, so it has a URI, but is not
dereferenceble even in principle).  It does have a description which could
have a dereferenceable URI, it has endpoints that can be dereferenceable, or
might be indirectly referenced by something like a WS-ROUTING description
....
 
Feh, this definitely is getting abstract!  But that's the world we live in,
no?