Practices and Constraints (was RE: Proposed text on 'SOA' (resend ))

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Orchard [mailto:dorchard@bea.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 11:04 PM
> To: 'He, Hao'; www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Proposed text on 'SOA' (resend)
> 
> 
> This isn't getting very far.  Maybe somebody else has the 
> time or energy to explain the difference between practices 
> and constraints.  I'll do a final round of comments inline 
> and then stop.

I agree that we need to distinguish these two better.  But the document as a
whole needs, IMHO anyway, to cover most of the aspects that Hao is talking
about.  I see various demands on the WSA document: One is just to help
people make sense of all the stuff thrown around by pundits, consultants,
and marketers, e.g. 'what's this "SOA" stuff and how does it relate to "web
services" and "objects" and "components"?' Another is to provide a formal
architectural framework (or maybe "ontology" isn't a bad word for it) that
lays out basic concepts, their relationship to one another, and how higher
level concepts are composed from them.  That's mainly aimed at spec writers,
although we of course have no guarantee that they will adopt our
framework/ontology.  Finally, there are best practice guidelines for actual
architects.  I'm not too sure we will get far with this because we all seem
to have different experiences (not to mention corporate axes to grind), but
there are probably some that will fall out of all this.  I'm pretty sure
that "coarse grained" and/or "loosely coupled" are best practice guides, not
architectural concepts ... But of course we should be able to tie them back
to the architecture.

My sense is that the focus of the WG should definitely be on the
architectural framework / ontology.  We should capture the "making sense of
the gibberish" thoughts and statements along the way, and note what appear
to be implications for best practice, but definitely not confuse the
formalisms with the rhetoric, or the axioms with the theorems.

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2003 10:28:11 UTC