Re: [soa-rm] On shared state

["Jeffrey A Estefan" <Jeffrey.A.Estefan@jpl.nasa.gov>]

Frank,

I must admit, my brain is starting to get a bit saturated with respect to
this issue surrounding "shared state."  I hope we can put it to bed soon.

Two things really worry me.  One is the temptation to introduce yet another
highly overloaded term such as "view" into the potential re-wording of the
draft spec.  I would encourage use to refrain from the use of view (and
"viewpoint") as these terms will influence our SOA-RA work in an ANSI/IEEE
1471-2000 Std. context and use of such terms should be consistent with such
a normative reference.

Second, shared state (including "distributed shared state") is certainly not
a new idea and a subject of extensive research in academia and industry (see
the various IEEE articles as an example).  If this is really what we mean,
then we should just leave the text as is because further elaboration will
likely result in more confusion.  What bothers me a bit is the potential
connection between shared state and coupling (i.e., tight coupling).
Remember the issue of coupling has been the subject of our RA discussions &
debate as of late.  Many of the existing SOA pundits out there believe that
loose coupling and stateless interactions are at the heart of SOA
architectural style interaction semantics, and they even go further to say
they are the heart of SOA best practices, period.  So how do we address
"shared state" without implying some element of coupling?  I do not have the
answer at this moment but hopefully, you and others on our team might have
that answer!

Cheers...

 - Jeff