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

Sort of.  But "loose coupling" is a tremendously broad pond, including
stuff like asynchronous exchanges, etc., while "distributed extensibility"
is some-
what narrower, and it would be a shame to lose that.  Over and out.

WM

>
> 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 12:18:40 UTC