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

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:53:04 -0400
Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> wrote:
> Look, I was *agreeing* with Amelia; there exist lots of services whose
> identifiers do not contain sufficient information to interact with the
> service.
> 
> But for *all* of those systems, it is possible to design a URI scheme
> (perhaps more than one) such that all the necessary information *is*
> contained in the URIs (either by value or by reference to a standard,
> as I mentioned).

This, though, is where I think we part company.  While it is *possible*
to design such schemes, it is not always practical.  In particular, when
other means already exist and are preferred, efforts to promote a
URI-based syntax tend to stall, stagnate, and fail.

*Can* be != is.  Also != *should* be, in my opinion.

> I think I also mentioned that every successful large scale distributed
> system (that I've looked it anyhow, which is many) has this property.

Depends on what you mean.  If you mean that all successful large scale
distributed systems use URIs for addressing, I do not agree.  If you
mean that they all use standardized addressing, it almost goes without
saying.

This discussion started from a question of whether WSDL addressing
syntax ought to permit only URI, or ought to permit more complex address
definition types.  As Mike Champion pointed out, in order to work with
stuff that currently exists, some of which cannot be identified by URI,
provision ought to be made to permit more complex types.  This was the
point in Arthur Ryman's original proposal that I believe you originally
objected to.  I objected to your objection, on the grounds that while
URI *might* one day be universal, at present it is not.

Summary: to support services that are not URI-locatable, it should be
possible to use more complex addressing syntax, rather than restricting
address syntax to URI alone.

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

Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 12:07:05 UTC