RE: Tool support goal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francis McCabe [mailto:fgm@fla.fujitsu.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 8:33 PM
> To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Tool support goal
> 

> D-AG010 The Web Services Architecture shall, where possible, enable 
> semi-automatic tools to support the construction of web services.

I'm skeptical of this as a goal.  For one thing, I think it's backwards --
if we meet the other requirements -- modularity, simplicity, etc. -- and
specs follow the architecture, then tool developers will be able to automate
the WSA with little difficulty.   Second, I think it's more important to
ensure that web services can be built WITHOUT tools than with them.  This is
a common issue in the debates between advocates of W3C Schema and advocates
of RELAX NG.  On one hand tools to minimize the labor needed to build W3C
Schemas are readily available; on the other hand, all but the most
specialzed experts NEED tools to build non-trivial W3C schemas.  I hope that
at least simple web services remain hand-codeable and human-debuggable.

 

> D-AC027.1 It is important to prohibit or discourage the use 
> of ANY type in descriptions of services and choreographies.

I'm not sure what this is getting at, what it has to do with tools, etc.  I
fear that it is saying "let's promote tight coupling driven by schemas to
make the world safe for automation."  That tends to make it unsafe for
humans, in my experience anyway :~)

> D-AC027.2 The WSA shall permit automatic validation of web services
> D-AC027.3 The WSA that allow for the automatic testing of web 
> services 
> and choreographies.
> D-AC027.3.1 Permit construction of test coverage suites
> D-AC027.3.2 Permit construction of client validation and server 
> validation test suites
> D-AC027.3.3 permit document verification and automatic document 
> generation (a la Javadoc)

These seem like worthwhile objectives, but I'm not at all sure what the WSA
could say or not say to affect them.  They're more general requirements on
specifications derived from WSA, no?

> 
> D-AC028 ensures that best practice modeling of web services is 
> supported; and that best practice tools can help automate the 
> construction of web services

Is "best practice" REALLY well-established here? 
> 
> D-AC028.1 Permit and encourage the use of standard modeling 
> language, in  particular UML, to model services, orchestrations and
service 
> compositions. This may require extensions to UML.

I think this was discussed in reference to another proposed requirement, and
got a lot of pushback.  I'm not a UML user and have no strong opinions, but
I get the sense that this is a "best practice" that works a lot better in
theory than practice.  And I would VIOLENTLY oppose taking on the task of
extending UML to make it web-services friendly; that's clearly a job for the
maintainers of UML.

Received on Thursday, 27 June 2002 21:37:30 UTC