RE: targetResource wording

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 11:58 AM
> To: www-ws-desc@w3.org
> Subject: targetResource wording
> 
>
> What if the service manipulates more than one resource?  For example
> (I think I gave this one before), what if the service transfers funds
> between bank accounts; which bank account should be identified with
> targetResource? 

The abstraction "accounts I can reference" rather than a specific bank
account, perhaps?   WSA has wrestled with what "thing" in the reference
architecture that targetResource maps onto, and the answer seems to be "mu."
targetResource is whatever a concrete thing or abstraction a specific
application developer chooses to define as being equivalent *for the
purposes of the application*.  (IMHO, based on my best understanding of WSDL
1.2 as drafted, and of course I could be wrong!)

> Or, alternately, are interfaces being constrained to
> only being able to manipulate a single resource (I like that one 8-)?

Uhh, I don't, astonishingly enough :-)  A Web service
agent/interface/implementation is a relatively concrete "resource" that
provides interfaces to manipulate objects, databases, physical things, etc.
without exposing their identity or properties over the Web.  Of couse, all
these things might have identity and *could* be Web resources (like Dan C.'s
famous car), but in  SOA/Web Services Architecture the all this is
implementation detail encapsulated by the service and its documented
interface (again IMHO).  So, the architectural style "expose everything as a
resource to be manipulated directly" is a special case of SOA/WSA, but WSDL
should be describing the more general case.

Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 12:39:15 UTC