Re: Proposal for Describing Web Services that Refer to Other Web Services: R085

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 22:54:20 -0400
Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 04:44:55PM -0400, Amelia A. Lewis wrote:
> > I completely disagree with this.
> 
> Hey, if you're arguing that some URI scheme designers don't take full
> advantage of URIs, you're preaching to the choir.  But that doesn't
> refute my point, which was just that URIs in general (i.e. RFC 2396)
> are designed to be a compact serialization of all the information
> necessary to interact with what they identify.  They are, and they're
> pretty darned effective when used this way.  You might notice that all
> commonly used URI schemes on the Internet have this property; that's
> not by accident.

You've missed my point completely.  The point is that there are services
available whose addresses are not described by agreed-upon URIs.  That
being the case, you can invent one, I can invent one, the service
deployers can invent one, but in general, without an agreed upon scheme,
a plethora of URIs is useless, or worse than useless.  If some other
means of obtaining the address *has* been agreed upon (which is the case
with J2EE), then there's less impetus to create a URI scheme.  These
services are effectively unfindable by URI.

> > It is not at all accurate to say that the URI that points to the
> > location where the address may be retrieved, using this complex
> > structure to identify the address desired, is the same as the URI of
> > the address desired.
> 
> The URI *could* be the address desired, if the scheme is designed
> properly and bound to an application protocol (not a transport
> protocol).

Please go *look* at how J2EE uses JNDI for retrieval of information. 
There *is* a URI, the URI *is* a properly designed URI, but it *doesn't*
point at the service address.  It points at a directory from which a
service address can be obtained.  In order to express this in WSDL (or
any other language intended to identify service endpoints), it is
necessary to include not only the URI of the directory, but additional
information allowing the address to be retrieved from the directory.

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis
Architect, TIBCO/Extensibility, Inc.
alewis@tibco.com

Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 10:24:37 UTC