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Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Requesters vs. Consumers
Consistency with other work aside, "request" strongly suggests how service consumption is initiated, and that is why I don't want to use it. Regards, Matt Thomas Erl wrote: > It's probably a good time to think about which term we should use to > represent the potential element responsible for invoking or initiating > a conversation with a service acting as the service provider. > Regardless of whether this becomes an "official" element within our > reference model, we will likely need to reference such an element in > our documentation. > > Below are some considerations we can take into account: > > - Both of the position papers submitted so far incorporate the term > "consumer". This term is also used in the ebSOA specification. > > - The W3C Web Services Architecture document submitted by Frank McCabe > uses the term "requester" and further qualifies it by suffixing it > with "entity" or "agent" to represent the owner and software program > respectively. (Prior to the current version of the W3C Working Note, > this document used the term "service requester" instead of "requester > agent".) > > - The W3C Web Services Glossary does not provide a definition for > "consumer", but defines "requester agent" as follows: "A software > agent that wishes to interact with a provider agent in order to > request that a task be performed on behalf of its owner - the > requester entity." > > - The term "requester agent" is used in the W3C WSDL 2.0 > specification, whereas "consumer" is used in the WSDL 1.1 version. > > - The definitions document submitted by Rebekah uses the term > "requester", most likely because the initial set of definitions were > provided by Frank. > > Given that we are seeking industry-wide acceptance of our reference > model, there may be a benefit to keeping our terminology in alignment > with terms already in use by established (albeit > implementation-specific) specifications. I personally have no > preference, but I do recommend we decide on one term and then consider > adding a definition to our glossary. We may want to leverage some of > the work performed by the W3C Working Group and decide whether we also > need separate terms to distinguish owner from implementation. > > On a related note, we have not yet discussed the concept of a service > or service agent assuming provider and requester/consumer roles. Such > a concept would also affect our definitions. > > Thomas > >
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