Re: [soa-rm] Requesters vs. Consumers

[Matthew MacKenzie <mattm@adobe.com>]

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
>
>