RE: working draft on architectural principles

Hi Roy,

Roy said:
Where does that fit in our document?  Well, for one, our document
claims that there is one WWW architecture.  Bah humbug.  We've already
defined two:

    1) agent-level interaction with Internet protocols; and
    2) information processing via separation of content and
       presentation.

Didier replies:
Why we cannot consider these as two facets of a single architecture? Why
not seeing that as principles or as constraints?

I can understand you own definition of an architecture but there are
others like, for instance, defining an architecture as a set of patterns
(coming from building architecture - ref: Alexander). 

Maybe you mean that the document overlaps two level in an architectural
hierarchy. But the separation of content from presentation is a
constraint that can be applied to both components/agents (i.e. the
server or the client or to any client or server proxy). It could either
be perceived as component's internal behavior or as a structural
constraint to be applied to components, the way processes are
distributed and how data and processing definition are distributed
through protocols. This leads to an other architectural view: an
architecture can be envisioned as a set of components and constraints.
This view leads to constraint based systems.

Maybe your point is that the document should precise its architectural
context and school of thoughts, is it that?

Cheers
Didier PH Martin

Received on Friday, 30 August 2002 10:01:07 UTC