Question on section 5.3, about conversatioal and policy in assembly draft

["Moberg Dale" <dmoberg@axway.com>]

 

This specification requires interfaces to be marked as conversational by means of a policy intent with the name "conversational". The form of the marking of this intent depends on the interface type. Note that it is also possible for a service or a reference to set the conversational intent when using an interface which is not marked with the conversational intent. This can be useful when reusing an existing interface definition that does not contain SCA information.

 

 

These sentences are a bit too cryptic for me to be certain what is being stated.

 

Consider the second sentence,

 

The form of the marking of this intent depends on the interface type

 

Is the idea here that policy may be conveyed in several ways, perhaps as part of scdl syntax and otherwise as annotation, perhaps? That is, I have noted that Java has annotations and I think

@conversational was one of them. Is this sentence saying that the “requires” and “provides” attributes can be skipped and instead policy is indicated by an implementation mechanism like annotation?

 

Or are the scdl defined attributes for intents always required?

 

I can grok that you want to allow the scdl attributes even when the java source lacks the annotation. (But if so, is the annotation in source superfluous for runtime operation?)