RE: Draft definition of WS

The point is valid, but I think that just about everybody agrees that
the basic intention behind "designed to support machine-to-machine ..."
is extremely important.  That's essentially what separates Web services
from ugly things like screen scraping Web sites.

I personally do not think that the current phrasing implies that it
can't be used on the same machine -- just that the common usage pattern
is different machines.  Recall, however, that I essentially brought up
the same point objecting to introducing the word "remote" into the
definition.

I think that removing "machine-to-machine" altogether would be a very
bad idea, but some sort of recognition somewhere that interactions on
the same machine are "OK" would be useful.  I don't think that anybody
would object to a specific Web service implementation that, for some
good reason, was not actually exposed to other machines.  The potential
would exist, of course, to expose it -- one can just turn that off if
appropriate.

Doesn't this sort of come under the security umbrella?  That is,
controlling the scope to which the service is exposed, with one extreme
being no network exposure whatsoever?

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Connell [mailto:brian@westglobal.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 10:43 AM
To: David Booth; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Draft definition of WS



Hi,

I have an issue I would like to raise with the phrase
'machine-to-machine'.

> A Web service is a software system, designed to support 
> machine-to-machine interaction over a network,

This implies that a Web service is not designed to be used if the
software systems are interacting on the same machine (even using the
same processor).

Can I suggest that we remove the 'machine-to-machine' term altogether,
or that we further qualify the word 'interaction' in a way that includes
software systems on the same 'machine'.


Regards,

Brian Connell

Received on Friday, 25 July 2003 12:28:38 UTC