Harvesting various sources for language about "Intermediaries"

[This is more of less a strawman proposal to jump-start discussion; Mike
Mahan and I have the action item to work on this but others may contribute.]

BACKGROUND/MOTIVATION

[tbd]


CONCEPT

A Web service intermediary is a software agent acts as a node in the SOAP
processing model; it receives, processes in some way, and forwards messages
from one node to another. Intermediaries are active and intelligent
participants in providing a service, not simply "passive" message relays:
they can act as routers, gateways, filters, logging agents, etc.; and they
can provide additional services such as authentication, enrcyption, digital
signatures, reliable messaging, load balancing, and so on without changing
the core service definition.  Intermediaries may work with information in
message bodies and / or message headers, and can add or remove headers as
appropriate.


RELATIONSHIPS

An INTERMEDIARY IS-A SOAP PROCESSING NODE [not sure if that is one of our
concepts!]

An INTERMEDIARY optionally adds or removes MESSAGE HEADERS

A SERVICE PROVIDER MAY use one or more INTERMEDIARIES to partition a SERVICE
across multiple NODES and/or to provide additional services that are
transparent to the SERVICE REQUESTER.


DISCUSSION

[tbd]

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 15:22:23 UTC