Re: Port Type Inheritance

Ricky:
Indeed, there is a similar sort of proposal that is on the table.
Steve Tuecke and I are representing the Global Grid Forum (GGF) at the W3C.
The GGF work we are doing (Grid Services) is an application/extension of
Web services.  Some of the domains we are modelling (CIM, from DMTF, for
example) have very rich "object" relationships in the interfaces.  This
work (and others) is crying out for something in WSDL to model interface
"extension".

The work the GGF has done proposes a notion of ServiceType extension, where
a designer can declare a serviceType to extend more base serviceTypes.

This proposal will be discussed shortly.

sgg

++++++++
Steve Graham
sggraham@us.ibm.com
(919)254-0615 (T/L 444)
Emerging Technologies
++++++++



                                                                                                                                       
                      Ricky Ho                                                                                                         
                      <riho@cisco.com>         To:       www-ws-desc@w3.org                                                            
                      Sent by:                 cc:                                                                                     
                      www-ws-desc-reque        Subject:  Port Type Inheritance                                                         
                      st@w3.org                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       
                      09/07/2002 01:33                                                                                                 
                      AM                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       




Hi,

Do we have any discussion around whether we need to provide inheritance for

WSDL PortType.  By inheritance, I mean the same concept as the Java
interface inheritance.  I do see two use cases.

1) Administrative operation
====================
For enterprise scale deployment, I want to monitor the health status of all

my web services, as well as to remote turn on debugging.  Therefore, I want

to mandate all my services to support certain operations such as "reset",
"getHealthStatus".  However, I have no way to enforce that at this moment.
It would be nice if I just need to tell my developer that their PortType
need to inherit "ManagablePortType" where such operations are defined.

2) Change control
=============
WSDL itself will evolve and change, but how do we make sure the newer
version is backward compatible to the old one so existing client won't
break.  If we have PortType inheritance, then the new PortType just need to

inherit the old PortType.  Of course, the implementation can optionally
throw a SOAP fault so that the client will be upgraded.

Thoughts and comments ??

Best regards,
Ricky

Received on Monday, 9 September 2002 04:12:24 UTC