Re: Data modelling

hello andy.

thanks a lot for your feedback!
>On the other hand, "excessive modelling" can produce something unusable.
>  It is hard balance. Some basic guidance by example would probably be
>very helpful to developers.

without going into the details of your comments (which are very relevant),
maybe the interesting question is whether the platform should talk about
"the things themselves" at all. coming from a SOA perspective, i don't
think it should even try. we should focus on the service layer, and it is
up to the service design to decide how to communicate information about
resources. for example, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#section-4.2.15
is fuzzy ("indicating the most recent instant in time when an entry or
feed was modified in a way the publisher considers significant.") for a
reason: as a consumer, i don't know how data is handled in the back-end,
and that's a feature. i am interested to learn about relevant events
published through the service i am consuming. if a typo in a news story is
corrected, please don't notify me, i really don't want to know. if,
however, major things happen, i want to know. so the question of what
we're communicating on the platform's service level should be completely
decoupled from what we're managing in the back-end, and how you translate
the data layer into the service level is a question of a service's design,
and not something that the platform should or even can define.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 18 June 2012 16:16:59 UTC