RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

A lot of people, myself included, think that trying to do "distributed
objects" using Web services is a big mistake.  I seem to recall people
saying that one of the goals of an architecture is to limit
alternatives, or something like that.  Surely a reasonable thing for an
architecture to articulate would be something like, "You can try to
implement objects in an SOA if you want, but that's not what it's for".

-----Original Message-----
From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of He, Hao
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 10:26 PM
To: 'Champion, Mike'; 'www-ws-arch@w3.org '
Subject: RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6


hi, Mike,

It appears to me that most people have, at least, agreed with the
following:

1. The architectural goal of SOA (and WS in general) is to "achieve
loose-coupling between interacting software agents in order to preserve
the benefits of reusability, extensibility and simplicity."

2. Two main architectural constraints of SOA: 1) A small set of simple
and ubiquitous interfaces to all participating software agents. 2)
Descriptive messages delivered through the interfaces.  

I, personally, would also add extensibility as part of the constraints
but Dave O would argue it is just a best practise (however, he believes
that extensibility is important and has written a number of articles on
it). 

As to the relationships among the terms  "distributed system", "service
oriented architecture," and  "web service", I believe there are just two
main kinds, those based on OO and those based on SOA. The confusion
comes when one tries to do "distributed objects" using Web services. 

Hao

-----Original Message-----
From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 8:26 AM
To: 'www-ws-arch@w3.org '
Subject: RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6



 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: He, Hao [mailto:Hao.He@thomson.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 4:20 PM
> To: 'Champion, Mike '; 'www-ws-arch@w3.org '
> Subject: RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

> I still think we need to define/explain SOA by formally
> listing the architectural constraints.  You sort of did it 
> but I am strongly in favor of explicitly listing them as constraints. 

That's what the previous draft tried to do.  I struggled with that
because I'm not at all sure how many of the SOA principles are core
definitions, which are really architectural constraints, and which are
best practices for developing *good* SOAs (e.g. coarse granularity).
What would you suggest as the list of constraints? 

> Can we also replace "There is considerable confusion in the
> computing industry about the relationships among the terms 
> "distributed system", "service oriented architecture," and 
> "web service", as well as to related technologies such as 
> ..." with something more positive?

OK, propose something! I don't have a problem with changing it, but I
think there *is* immense confusion about this stuff.  

> 
> BTW, I predicted in my article
> (http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html)
> that someone would soon replace the original meaning of SOAP 
> with Service Oriented Architecture Protocol. Now, you did it. :)

I was trying to remember who I stole that from!  I should have cited
your article too, because I remember reading it and getting a lot out of
it a few months ago.  I remember thinking about stealing your CD-playing
service example when I first started wrestling with this action item,
but decided that it was too informal for this document.

Received on Monday, 12 January 2004 11:13:16 UTC