Reliable Messaging: Division of Responsibilities (was RE: REST, C onversations and Reliability)

The REST, Conversations and reliability thread has been
informative. I am splitting out what I believe to be one of the
key design issues to come from it in hopes of focusing and
progressing to a useful architecture document.

*If* we assume that the view that applications must share *some*
responsibility for reliability, then I think our task is to add
as many semantics and formalized processes to access and manage
these semantics.

This approach will allow the responsibility to be shared and
evolve over time while supporting a high level of interoperability.
Specifically, the roles and responsibilities of intermediaries seem
to be an important but insufficiently defined factor in this division
of labor.

Does this make sense? If so, should we begin to define the interface
between transport and application in these terms? 

Regards,
Dave


------------------
Edwin K writes:
The point is here is not as much about hiding the reliability logic
layer from the application logic layer but to allow the application
logic to delegate reliability.


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 11:01 PM
To: David Orchard; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: REST, Conversations and Reliability



David Orchard wrote:
> 
> I understand the point you are making, which is about the scalability of
> reliability solutions that span trust domains.

...snip
> Paul P:
I also feel that the paper offers compelling evidence that applications
*cannot be agnostic* about reliability issues. Reliability must be
worked into the fabric of the application logic:

...snip
> Paul P:
In other words, the programmer's interface and application logic must be
changed: reliability cannot be outsourced.

> Dave O:
> but I think we have some new technology - like the web URIs, XML, SOAP,
> WSDL - as well as past experience that will help us.  And I think we can
use
> these technologies in ways that loosely couple reliability to application
> semantics.

Every past attempt to solve this problem has built on technologies that
were isomorphic to URIs, XML, SOAP and WSDL. But there is no need
arguing specifics. You believe things are much different this time
around. I do not.
--

Received on Thursday, 8 August 2002 13:54:18 UTC