- From: Champion, Mike <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
- Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 21:17:35 -0500
- To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
This is my "get the ball rolling" message I agreed to post: The current wording of this requirement says simply "provides simplicity and ease-of-use that does not impose high barriers to entry for users of web services". As we discussed today, there are several dimensions to "simplicity and ease of use" that need to be brought out in our deliberations, and possibly in the requirements. First, is "simple for whom?" We identified three types of uses of our architecture: - Spec writers in WG's defining components we identify (e.g., the WSD WG) - Programmers implementing those specifications - End-users of those implementations (e.g., customers using a web services IDE) Also, "simplicity" of what we produce means different things: - The exposition of the architecture is easy to understand -- clear prose, helpful illustrations, etc. - A small number of concepts and relationships suffices to describe the architecture - The target audience has little difficulty using the architecture Furthermore, there are tradeoffs among these goal. For example, a truly minimal and elegant definition of the architecture would probably use formalisms that made it difficult for much of the audience to understand. Likewise, "minimilistic" approaches in general are easy to understand and implement, but cumbersome to use because they lack "convenience classes" to do common things in a way that simplifies life for the end user while making more work for the implementer. Here's some strawman language that is a first attempt to reconcile all this: "The W3C Web Services Reference Architecture is intended primarily for the use of other working groups specifying the components identified in the architecture, secondarily for developers implementing the components, and incidentally for end users of those components. The exposition of the reference architecture MUST, to the greatest extent feasible, be understandable by a "typical" experienced software designer/developer: it should use a minimum of specialized jargon, employ simple declarative sentences wherever possible, and be organized and illustrated in a way to minimize the amount of effort required to understand it. The reference architecture SHOULD specify as few components and relationships as are minimally necessary meet the other requirements. The reference architecture MAY, within the other contstraints, describe use cases and examples intended to clarify how an application programmer would use its components to build typical applications that utilize web services." Flame away ...
Received on Thursday, 7 March 2002 21:18:27 UTC