RE: SOA proposed text - harvesting previous threads

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francis McCabe [mailto:fgm@fla.fujitsu.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 6:31 PM
> To: Champion, Mike
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: SOA proposed text - harvesting previous threads
> 

> 
> The SOA is founded on three key ideas:
> 
> 1. Conversation oriented interactions as opposed to 
> object-oriented interactions. I.e., the focus in on what goes 
> on the wire, and not what happens at either end.
> 
> 2. The agent abstraction - services are provided and 
> requested by computing entities called agents. The central 
> constraint being that we are *not* allowed to know anything 
> about how the agent is built, the only thing that we can see 
> are the messages it emits and consumes.
> 
> 3. Copious quantities of meta-data (or otherwise known as 'death by
> description') permits human and automatic agents to figure 
> out how to interoperate.

I like those a lot!  Not a million miles from what I wrote, but has much
less of the "a service oriented architecture is an architecture made up of
services that provide a service" blather that my draft still suffers from to
a certain extent.

> 
>  there are no addresses of 
> agent-internal objects in messages. This is the stateless 
> constraint expressed differently. 

> 
> On the other hand, business-level entities - such as account 
> numbers - may still be exposed in messages.


 I think that could be rephrased in MUST / MUST NOT terms to fit the
IETF/W3C style :-)

> =========
> As Hao pointed out, SOA's do seem to denote a more abstract 
> architecture than the Web architecture, it is at a similar 
> level to that of REST. (REST adds more: the concept of a 
> resource, and that conversations are about resources.)

Right.  Dave Orchard's old message that I referenced makes this argument,
and I think we really need to spell out exactly how REST = SOA (where the
service is to get/put/update/delete resource representations) + more
constraints

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2003 19:21:31 UTC