RE: targetResource wording

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 2:05 PM
> To: www-ws-desc@w3.org
> Subject: Re: targetResource wording
> 
>

> The resource(s) that a service uses are part of the 
> implementation of a
> service, not its interface.  Please don't conflate the two.

OK, how about an ERP system whose functionality one wants to expose as Web
services to other applications in an enterprise; its "implementation
resources" are RDBMS tables for the most part.  Surely you're not suggesting
that the other applications directly read/write/delete records in those
separate tables are you Mark?  Doesn't it make a *lot* more sense for the
"service" to be an interface to some component that performs business-level
operations ("add new employee" or whatever) on those tables but hides the
implementation details from the service consumer?

This is the essence of the difference between REST and [whatever the
alternative is called], IMHO.  REST seems to imply that the "real" or
"implementation" resources should be exposed via their URI and some minimal
set of operations directly on them; the [alternative] approach allows the
identified resource to be an interface that encapsulates and may well hide
the implementation details of the back-end resources.

So I agree that one should not conflate the interface and implementation
resources, and see REST as a special case of [the alternative] where the
interface and implementation are identical, but strongly disagree that WSDL
should expose the resources that a service uses as part of its
implementation rather than those that define the interface.

Received on Sunday, 15 June 2003 15:00:56 UTC