RE: Section 1.6 and REST - Can we make this more clear and useful ?

Mike,

This reorg proposal makes a lot of sense to me, it would be good to see the discussion in the stakeholders viewpoint section and beef up the definitional parts of the introduction.  I should be able to provide some text for it.

I apologize once again that the day job has taken me away from this work so often.  When I started in this WG two years ago I did so because of a strong belief that the industry really needs and can benefit from an independent architecture for Web services.  Unfortunately the last year was really tough for my company and I've had to devote most of my time to aspects of the business more directly related to revenue.  I'm sure I'm not alone in that but I'm no less disappointed to be taken away from this WG's work.

However, I also have to say it seems very doubtful that the W3C will sponsor any further work in this area, or even endorse what's been done to date, given the proposed Web services activity for next year.  In fact I'd go so far as to say the SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 2.0 work is at risk of being sidelined as well.

Regards,

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 10:01 AM
To: Newcomer, Eric
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Section 1.6 and REST - Can we make this more clear and
useful ?



On Jan 24, 2004, at 6:42 AM, Newcomer, Eric wrote:

> Mike,
>
> I don't think non-rest is object oriented, and I don't think SOAP is 
> object oriented.  As a CORBA company, we try to make a very clear 
> distinction between something we consider object-oriented such as C++ 
> CORBA for example, and something that isn't.  SOAP explicitly excludes 
> most, if not all, of the characteristics of object based systems.

It's too bad you've been so busy lately; Iona is exactly the kind of 
company that has the perspective spanning CORBA, Web services, and SOA 
that we need to tap here.  I hope we can spend a bit of time at the F2F 
tightening up what we want to say.


>
> Amazon.com says (Jeff Barr I think, check Doug Kaye's IT Conversations 
> at www.rds.com) that the majority of their "web services" users choose 
> the "REST" style, although what they mean by that is plain XML 
> documents.  A good number use what they call SOAP style, meaning XML 
> documents in SOAP format.  ...

> We have a problem in our document when we use the term "REST" to apply 
> to Web services since it's not in our definition of a Web service.  I 
> think it was a good try, all right, but we probably should focus on 
> wordsmithing what's there and avoid reflecting the type of debate 
> that's going on in the email list since it will never end...

Actually, maybe this belongs in the Stakeholders Perspectives and not 
the Introduction.  I agree that the Introduction should focus the 
reader on what we plan to cover in Concepts/Relationships, and that is 
Web services as we (finally) defined them in terms of SOAP and WSDL.

So, here's what I propose (and it is more in the way of moving text 
around than changing what we have or -- Heaven forbid -- wallowing in 
the REST troutpond once again:  Section 1.6 should be a very quick 
overview of what we understand the meaning of Web, Web services, SOA, 
etc. to be and a rationale for why we focus only on the 
concepts/relationships that we do focus on.  The bulk of the 1.6 stuff 
would go into one or more Stakeholders Perspectives -- after all, "XML 
over the Web" users are stakeholders in this discussion, even if the 
formal definition of Web services doesn't really cover them well.  
People who are promoting SOA [Iona and Software AG come to mind :-) ] 
are stakeholders in a discussion of how SOA relates to web services, 
the web, CORBA, etc.

I think that would help balance Eric's concern that the document be 
definitive, and my desire for the document to capture the "informative 
and descriptive" position on things we spent so much time talking about 
and -- at least within the WG -- have come to a majority view on.   I 
would like to see a future incarnation of a W3C Architecture group 
address these issues in a definitive way with all the major players at 
the table, but for now I'm most interested in ensuring that the world 
can see an "informative" view of what we've more or less agreed on 
[Hao's dissent is noted!] so that what I think is a pragmatic middle 
ground doesn't get lost (or laboriously rediscovered) in future 
debates.

Anyway, if this requires a lot of discussion, we just have to take 
Eric's advice and toss it.  If so, no big deal, any of us who are 
interested in documenting the "pragmatic middle ground" for posterity 
can collaborate on an article or W3C submission or something.

Received on Sunday, 25 January 2004 11:46:45 UTC