RE: Machine-To-Machine

Actually, I read "machine-to-machine" as inclusive of the scenario in which
a UserAgent communicates with an OriginServer, e.g., traditional HTTP.

-bryan

-----Original Message-----
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
To: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler); www-ws-arch@w3.org
Sent: 7/26/2003 5:44 PM
Subject: RE: Machine-To-Machine

One more thought.  I believe that if you think about it you will find
that the wordings that emphasize the absence of live human beings
actually exclude some rather important usage scenarios where the Web
services are being invoked from applications being used by people.
Since a number of the member companies of the W3C are putting big bucks
into devising and marketing such implementations, this would seem to me
to be ... unwise.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) 
Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 4:28 PM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Machine-To-Machine



I am in favor of using the phrase machine-to-machine, possibly with a
footnote or glossary entry explaining more fully what we mean and
reassuring people that we do not intend to exclude implementations on
one machine but simply to point out the thrust of what Web services are
intended for.  My reasons are as follows:

1 - This was the phrase used by D Booth in his survey which formed the
basis of the recent discussion and move-forward on the subject.  That
phrasing found strong support and energy.  Nobody seemed to have trouble
understanding what it meant.  Why mess with success?

2 - The phrase, to my understanding, is commonly used to mean pretty
much exactly what we want to use it for.  Why mess with common usage?

There are some reasonable alternatives that have been proposed.  I think
that they all have weaknesses.  Specifically: 

"Application-to-application": 

1 - Somewhat embarrassingly, browsers and Web servers are applications. 

2 - Some might think that this term unduly emphasizes the RPC style of
Web services. 

"interactions between agents (as defined by ws-arch definition of
agent), where the agents are not directly controlled by humans":

1 - Wordy and not oriented toward common usage of terms. 

2 - "Not directly controlled by humans" might be interpreted completely
differently than intended.  "Directly" might reasonably be interpreted
as "without intermediary".  I think that the word David might have been
reaching for might have been "synchronously", but that word has problems
with us at the moment.  We are currently deprecating its use.  At any
rate, I think that this kind of detailed verbiage belongs in an
explanation of what we mean by "machine-to-machine", not up front.

"designed to support interactions that do not require human involvement
at runtime 
between agents over a network" 

1 - Grammatically fuzzy (antecedants are unclear), but I suppose it can
be cleaned up.  Is it "interaction between agents" or "involvement
between agents"?  I actually don't know.  Hmmm, probably interaction.
How about, "designed to support interactions between agents over a
network that do not require human involvement at runtime"?   Ugh, that's
a syntactic mess too.  Does "require" refer to "network"?

2 - Why not just "machine-to-machine".  This seems to be an attempt to
explain in a lot of words what that means.  Flesh it out into several
sentences so that what modifies what is clear and this seems like
another good start at a glossary entry for machine-to-machine.  But
fleshed out into several sentences is probably too much for the context
in which we are talking about using it.

Received on Sunday, 27 July 2003 06:49:25 UTC