RE: Closing issue X

Mark,

The problem, as always, is that "broke" is not an absolute concept, certainly not in the specifications under discussion here.  Many implementations of Web services specifications actually work.  The argument is over how well, and that must involve considering what the implementations are used for.  As I've said many times, the use case for Web services is very different than the use case for hypertext document exchange.

The argument seems to be that HTTP was never designed for Web services, and therefore should not be used for them.  Or at least, to implement Web services the same way as hypertext systems were implemented.  This is like saying telephone lines were never designed for use by fax machines or modems, and therefore should not be used to send digital signals.  All communication over telephone lines should be done using analog voices, since that's what they were designed for.

My view of your proposed text is not at the right level for the architecture document, and that's why I voted not to close the issue.  It starts out ok, but at the end becomes prescriptive text of constraint, while to be self-consistent it needs to be descriptive text at the conceptual level.  HTTP might be a useful reference as an example, but not as concrete information.  

The text is fine up to this point:

"...so we feel that interfaces richer than GET/PUT/POST/etc.. are necessary."

The concept of Web services being used for program-program interaction as compared with hypertext being used for human interaction is correct, and something we can all agree with.  However, to say that interfaces richer than GET/PUT/POST are necessary "a priori" is completely out of context to the rest of the paragraph.  At what point did the paragraph's topic include anything about interfaces?  If you want to propose text for the document, that's fine, but it needs to be done consistently.  If you want to introduce a discussion about interfaces, that's fine, but it needs to  be done within the context of various use cases, exploring the entire issue thoroughly, rather than as a simple juxtaposition of GET/PUT/POST within a paragraph about a high-level concept.

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Baker, Mark 
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 9:50 PM
To: David Orchard
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Closing issue X



On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 05:51:35PM -0800, David Orchard wrote:
> If it ain't broke, etc.

Well, see, the problem is that it *is* quite broken.  Come on, at least
admit that the possibility exists.  Disregarding a constraint that
Roy Fielding and Dan Connolly say is key, loses you important
properties, and the Web services architecture doesn't include
enough additional constraints to recover those properties.  In
particular, visibility, which has been a requirement of *all* Internet
scale applications since the Internet began.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Friday, 13 December 2002 08:08:12 UTC