Re: [soa-rm] Definitions

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

Don:

Thank you for these initial submissions.  There are certain terms that 
we already have defined in our charter.  For example, architecture is 
defined as "A software architecture for a system is the structure or 
structures of the system, which consist of elements and their externally 
visible properties, and the relationships among them."  Although this 
(along with everything else) is open for discussion, I would rather 
press ahead and keep this definition for now since it is abstracted from 
generally accepted software architecture principles and widely agreed to.

The other definitions should remain in the abstract, not concrete tense 
when defining.  An example of how this may affect certain definitions:

Instead of:
"Agent (requester or provider) - Concrete piece of software or hardware 
that sends or receives messages in an SOA transaction."

An abstract tense is:
"An entity acting on behalf of another entity to fulfill a task".  This 
is in no way specific.

It as not even been established that messages are part of the core 
reference model, in fact, I would state they are likely not necessary to 
be present in all implementations.  A application's service may have a 
binding that allows someone to submit a message to it, but that message 
does not have to be physically sent to make the application "service 
oriented".  Messaging , of course, is absolutely necessary when building 
a concrete service oriented architecture.

Messaging is also not present in a transactional sense in all SOA's.  I 
would consider Bluetooth an SOA yet it does not only employ point to 
point-cast messaging.  It also uses broad-cast and point-to-multi-cast.

Duane Nickull

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