Re: Proposed text for section 1.6.2 and 1.6.3

Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) wrote:
> It appears to me, however, that we are moving toward declaring the term "Web service" as being essentially undefined.  I think that this would be a huge disappointment to many and a failure to respond to a fundamental, though perhaps unstated, expectation of most of the stakeholders in the work of this WG.  I believe that we are essentially empowered to define the term, and if we cannot reach a consensus on this we have failed very fundamentally.
> 

Agree. But a SOA implies services, I think.

> - Agents identify objects in the system, called "resources," with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
> - Agents represent, describe, and communicate resource state via "representations" of the resource in a variety of widely-understood data formats (e.g. XML, HTML, CSS, JPEG, PDF ). 
> - Agents exchange representations via  protocols that use URIs to identify and directly or indirectly address the agents and resources.

If you shift this from describing the agent using the service to the 
service itself, perhaps you could say a web service:

1. is identifiable as a named resource (personally I am not very happy 
equating this with a URI, although this seems to be the consensus view).
2. can produce and/or consume data in some standard representation, as
part of a distributed system.
3. can participate in a specified pattern of data exchanges.

This avoids saying the metadata is WSDL, or the payload is XML vs. 
something else (leaving open the possibility of a REST-based web 
service). A REST-based service uses fixed verbs and may not have 
metadata (since the verbs are universal and well-understood). A 
WSDL-based web service has WSDL metadata. A WSDL/SOAP web service in 
addition uses SOAP as its data representation.

This possibly wouldn't even exclude something like CORBA, at least in 
its modern incarnation that supports IIOP.

--Jon

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 14:06:58 UTC