- From: Savas Parastatidis <Savas.Parastatidis@Newcastle.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 17:10:33 -0000
- To: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>
- Cc: <public-ws-addressing@w3.org>
Dear Dave, > > I think we are now at the point of diminishing returns of the argument. > > As I understand your position, the reasons against a mandatory action > are: > - not all applications need it so it's extra/useless > - there will be garbage content when applications don't need it > - it may be redundant and any redundant data is bad practice in any > systems design. > > I've already admitted to these points being valid. Great! Please allow me to understand better your assertions with regards to the architecture-related benefits of wsa:action. Note that I am not objecting, just trying to understand. > > My argument is that even with these negatives, I think in the large > majority of cases, a mandatory Action is useful because it fundamentally > enables self-describing messages. This enables: > - greater visibility into the message If we assume that wsa:action may contain garbage, how is greater visibility achieved? Also, what about the cases where the semantics of the message are content-based? > - simpler processing of the message by applications or intermediaries I personally don't see why wsa:action enables these. Checking the value of the wsa:action header isn't as simple as checking the qname of the soap:Body child in order to infer semantics or any other protocol-specific header as suggested in [1]? Since the semantics are not reflected by the information header itself but rather by its value, intermediaries are required to understand the header AND to know about its possible values. > - simpler development of applications > - simpler message creation Why adding an extra header to carry semantics of the message make the development/creation simpler? Isn't it the case that the more assumptions we make about what all applications may need, the more inflexible we make the architecture? > - more flexible deployment of services This is true if wsa:action is not (ab)used as an RPC mechanism :-) > - higher performant > > I'm using the architecture properties of interest as listed in REST for > my comparison. It would be helpful if we could adopt common > terminology, such as application performance, network performance, > visibility into messages, simplicity, etc. > I attempted to deal with the simplicity and visibility arguments when wsa:action does not exist in [1] and [2]. <snip /> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-addressing/2004Nov/0239.ht ml [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-addressing/2004Nov/0177.ht ml Best regards, .savas.
Received on Monday, 8 November 2004 17:12:16 UTC