Re: Debating on the usefulness of supporting a) Stateful Web Service Instances b) Stateful Interaction

Mark,

Below, are you saying application state and conversation(al) state are
the same thing?

Walden

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
To: "Savas Parastatidis" <Savas.Parastatidis@newcastle.ac.uk>
Cc: <www-ws@w3.org>; <umit.yalcinalp@oracle.com>; "Jim Webber"
<jim.webber@arjuna.com>; "Steve Graham" <sggraham@us.ibm.com>; "Krishna
Sankar" <ksankar@cisco.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: Debating on the usefulness of supporting a) Stateful Web
Service Instances b) Stateful Interaction


>
> Hi Savas,
>
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 09:08:34PM +0100, Savas Parastatidis wrote:
> > Mark,
> > >
> > > b) is less obvious, but most Web services interfaces I've seen are
> > > stateful.  I believe this is attributable to the simple fact that it
> > > takes effort to design stateless interfaces, whereas stateful
> > interfaces
> > > are the default.
> > >
> >
> > I would argue that SOA says nothing about the statefulness of the
> > services exposed through an interface.
>
> I agree.  I was just referring to interfaces I've seen; most of them
> (other than the trivial getFoo() ones) are stateful.
>
> > I agree that most of the Web
> > services have to maintain some state behind the scenes in order to be of
> > any use but the semantics of SOA do not mandate that (at least that's my
> > understanding).
>
> Erm, well you seem to be talking about a) state there.  I'm talking
> about b) state, aka "application state" or "conversation state".  In
> that context, "stateful" is where the interpretation of message
> semantics depends upon information not available within the message
> itself (sometimes called "shared context").
>
> Mark.
> -- 
> Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
>
>