RE: A Priori Information (Was Snapshot of Web Services Glossary )

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
> Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 10:29 AM
> To: Champion, Mike; www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: A Priori Information (Was Snapshot of Web 
> Services Glossary
> )
 
> I read "distributed extensibility" as something different 
> from discovery.
> I think it means services can extend their function without breaking
> clients, and also without the designers of the services and 
> the designers
> of the clients sitting down ahead of the changes and hammering out
> the new design. 

Hmm, sortof what people usually call "loose coupling?"  That makes sense.
But it's different than prior/a priori understanding ... it's saying that
once you come to some out-of-band agreement, you shouldn't break it

I'm thinking of proposing that this all  comes under a general "loose
coupling" statement to the effect that "cool web services don't force their
clients to know all that much about their details in order to use them."
One aspect of that is that "cool web services" should allow themselves to be
bootstrapped -- GETing a base URI provides a description (we get into the
TAG RDDL discussion here ...) of its semantics and invocation syntax.  But I
think this is all about best practices, not deep architecture.   And  best
practices are hard to come by even on the hypertext Web; AFAIK even
Fielding's thesis  is a theory of which practices will turn out to be best
on the hypertext Web rather than an empirical examination of what actually
works best.  I could be wrong, and I don't want to open a trout pond here
...

Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 11:18:57 UTC