- From: Champion, Mike <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
- Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 18:48:41 -0700
- To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> > > -----Original Message----- > From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net] > Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 8:20 PM > To: Francis McCabe; Mark Baker > Cc: Burdett, David; www-ws-arch@w3.org > > This raises an important point. In most applications I have > experienced and most I can conceive of, clients understand > the problem domain in terms of the state of domain objects. > They don't want to toggle the switch, they want the light on. > They don't care what starting state it was in. This is too > prevalent to dismiss. > > Things which are operation-centric and state-agnostic tend to > be games, not businesses. It seems to me that for the vast majority of applications of Web services that I'm aware of TODAY, the "service" is some operation to be invoked that does something out in the real world -- transfer money, make plane reservations, integrate operations using an SAP system in one division with a Baan system in another division, and so on. Ultimately, these result in real things happening: I get on a plane, I get money from the ATM, my Amazon.com order arrives by FedEx, and so on. I would not begin to dispute that one COULD model all these things as transfers of information rather than invocations of operations, but the fact remains that most of those boarding passes are printed, cash dispensed, and books are shipped under the control of bazillions of lines of procedural code that is NOT going to be re-written because it is no longer fashionable. And ultimately, something happens in the real world because switches are toggled, doors opened, trucks loaded, bills dispensed, etc. Note all the verbs! The more reasonable approach seems to me that *some* services involve primarily the transfer of information around the Web, and they are good candiates for a RESTful design, and *other* services involve the invocation of an action, and they are good candidates for an SOA design.
Received on Saturday, 22 February 2003 20:49:15 UTC