Re: Web Service Definition [Was "Some Thoughts ..."]

Roger,

> I like the way that this definition is going, too, but I think that as it
> stands it is too broad because I think it will include orchestrations and
> the sense of the group seemed to be that orchestrations are a higher level
> construction than web services.  In order to fix this I suggest that we
> define a web service as having the following participants, all identified by
> URI's:
> 
> 1) A single "requestor".
> 
> 2) A single "responder".
> 
> 3) Zero or more "recipients".
> 
> A web service is initiated by a communication from the requestor to the
> responder and the responder sends any number of communications to the
> recipients.  All these commmunications are via web protocols.

I think you're too narrow now. 8-O  SOAP 1.2 explicitly supports
an extensible array of message exchange patterns[1].  Defining a web
service in these terms would unnecessarily restrict our scope, IMO.

For example, consider a voting service where I can ask a set of people
to vote for or against something.  In this case, there are multiple
responders.

I'm not sure how what Steve or I suggested relates to orchestrations.
I see orchestrations (as I understand the term) to be Composites[2],
that is, that they are themselves Web services.

 [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part2/#soaptmep
 [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CompositePattern

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Monday, 25 February 2002 12:40:04 UTC