RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

hi, Mike,

It appears to me that most people have, at least, agreed with the following:

1. The architectural goal of SOA (and WS in general) is to "achieve
loose-coupling between interacting software agents in order to preserve the
benefits of reusability, extensibility and simplicity."

2. Two main architectural constraints of SOA: 1) A small set of simple and
ubiquitous interfaces to all participating software agents. 2) Descriptive
messages delivered through the interfaces.  

I, personally, would also add extensibility as part of the constraints but
Dave O would argue it is just a best practise (however, he believes that
extensibility is important and has written a number of articles on it). 

As to the relationships among the terms  "distributed system", "service
oriented architecture," and  "web service", I believe there are just two
main kinds, those based on OO and those based on SOA. The confusion comes
when one tries to do "distributed objects" using Web services. 

Hao

-----Original Message-----
From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 8:26 AM
To: 'www-ws-arch@w3.org '
Subject: RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6



 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: He, Hao [mailto:Hao.He@thomson.com.au] 
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 4:20 PM
> To: 'Champion, Mike '; 'www-ws-arch@w3.org '
> Subject: RE: Proposed replacement text for Section 1.6

> I still think we need to define/explain SOA by formally 
> listing the architectural constraints.  You sort of did it 
> but I am strongly in favor of explicitly listing them as constraints. 

That's what the previous draft tried to do.  I struggled with that because
I'm not at all sure how many of the SOA principles are core definitions,
which are really architectural constraints, and which are best practices for
developing *good* SOAs (e.g. coarse granularity).  What would you suggest as
the list of constraints? 

> Can we also replace "There is considerable confusion in the 
> computing industry about the relationships among the terms 
> "distributed system", "service oriented architecture," and 
> "web service", as well as to related technologies such as 
> ..." with something more positive?

OK, propose something! I don't have a problem with changing it, but I think
there *is* immense confusion about this stuff.  

> 
> BTW, I predicted in my article
> (http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html) 
> that someone would soon replace the original meaning of SOAP 
> with Service Oriented Architecture Protocol. Now, you did it. :)

I was trying to remember who I stole that from!  I should have cited your
article too, because I remember reading it and getting a lot out of it a few
months ago.  I remember thinking about stealing your CD-playing service
example when I first started wrestling with this action item, but decided
that it was too informal for this document.