Resolution of LC89e

Hi Rich:

I'm writing on behalf of the WSDL working group in order to explain why
we declined your issue [1] regarding properties as a runtime construct
which "doesn't belong in WSDL".

While it is certainly true that *some* properties fit the description
you offered, we believe you over-generalized and that the property
mechanism in general is indeed appropriate and useful for WSDL.  The F&P
mechanism can certainly encompass truly "runtime" properties, and in
fact can even specify properties that have well defined meanings such as
"the current time of day" or "the authenticated user-id".  Clearly it
wouldn't make any sense to specify values for these properties in a WSDL
file.  Then there are also properties which are more appropriately set
via deployment configuration, such as "the database password".  These
shouldn't really be in WSDL either.  However, this does not mean that
specifying a value (or a constraint) for properties in general is a bad
idea in WSDL - the purpose of the mechanism is to allow communicating to
users and other implementers of your interface/service/etc that
particular capabilities are offered or requirements must be satisfied,
in much the same way that expressing a schema indicates to other
users/implementers that there are constraints on the XML structures
which should be respected.

We hope this satisfies your concerns.  We would appreciate it if you
could acknowledge this message with either an "ok", or further comment,
within two weeks.

Thanks!
--Glen, for the WSDL WG

[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/desc/4/lc-issues/issues.html#LC89e

Received on Thursday, 5 May 2005 11:02:28 UTC