RE: Who Faulted (was RE: Proposed rewrite of Part 1, section 2 (l ong) )

I agree with Jacek that it seems problematic to distinguish between node
and actor. I think we have to be careful with our use of the term "role"
and "actor" as I don't think the analogy with the silver screen holds.
There, the term "role" implies that there is an actor and that the actor
has a name that is different from the role. That is, we can have "Sean
Connery" (the actor) acting as "James Bond" (the role) and normally we
distinguish between referring to Sean or to James as they are different
entities. Furthermore, it is only under certain conditions that "Sean
Connery" and "James Bond" are the same, "James Bond" could also refer to
"Roger Moore" and so on.

In the current SOAP model, we only have one identifier which is the
value of the actor attribute. Any form of "equality" between references
has to be determined out of band. For example, our "next" URI defines
out of band (in prose in our spec) that it is equal to any identifier
identifying the receiving SOAP Node when it is present in a SOAP
message. The equality could also be stated declaratively as a set of
statements asserting that two identifiers are the same under certain
conditions, or it could be determined implicitly by some resolver
mechanism.

Note that we say nothing about *how* one resolves the actor name as
resolution is a matter of trust. That is, I can have names that are
resolved to identify a specific SOAP node using some out of band
mechanism or names that are resolved using DNS. The "next" URI is an
example of the former.

For better or for worse, I think the current description in SOAP 1.2,
part 1 section 2 is adequate and consistent with the general Web
architecture of URI references. I therefore suggest that we leave it as
is.

Henrik

> I think that even though more complicated, modeling it as an 
>extension would be much cleaner because of avoiding all that 
>node stuff in the core.  Additionally, adding faultNode would 
>IMHO _not_ be consistent with faultActor because actor is a 
>known and used and well defined term, whereas node was so far 
>only an abstract term.  For these reasons I would initially 
>oppose to the WG discussing this addition. But then, the 
>discussion has already started as 
>this dialog. 8-)

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2002 17:30:22 UTC