Re: [oslc-core] Consumer/provider vs Client/server

[John Arwe <johnarwe@us.ibm.com>]

The reasoning reminds me of times when
people fall into the habit of 
(1) confusing roles and actors playing
roles.
(2) wanting to use identical terms for
informal discussions and formal reasoning/specifications.

Most "things we call providers"
are actors... "big hunks of code" with product or component names
and so on.  The bigger the hunk of code, the more likely it plays
multiple roles and has multiple interactions.

HTTP client and HTTP server are defined to be roles played in a single interaction.

People don't get into these habits because they're foolish or wanton (well, not all people ;-) ).  Anyone "not in the room" will easily get confused by the formal terms because they have nuances of meaning that they're unaware of (role vs actor) and/or don't care about the distinctions in a particular informal discussion.... perhaps in a majority of those discussions.  Context matters.

It might be that we have to live with the fact that ... in formal contexts like normative text ... we need to use a certain constrained vocabulary, and in less formal areas we can be more flexible, and accept the differences in precision.  I could imagine, for example, overtly defining producer/provider and consumer to simply be ambiguous terms, explaining that provider Usually means "acts as an HTTP server a majority of the time", and analogous for client.

At the very least I can see value in agreeing on the terms used *in normative text*, and in that context I prefer to re-use HTTP's well-defined terms rather than try to break new ground.

Best Regards, John

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