RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better

[Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>]

and further responses inline

At 03:06 PM 12/6/2005, Duane Nickull wrote:

Comments inline:
 
*******************************
Adobe Systems, Inc. - http://www.adobe.com
Vice Chair - UN/CEFACT  http://www.uncefact.org/
Chair - OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee
Personal Blog - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
*******************************
 

---

From: Ken Laskey [ mailto:klaskey@mitre.org]
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 10:39 AM
To: Duane Nickull; Goran Zugic; Matt MacKenzie; MATHEWS, Tim; Sally St. Amand; frank.mccabe@us.fujitsu.com
Cc: soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [soa-rm] Proposal: Reorganization of SOA-RM Draft for Better
 
I think we need to add some words to the RM to capture this discussion.  We cover part of this in the beginning of Section 3.2.1 but need to be more specific that:

- a service consumer can be a human or a software agent;
DN: given that we have scoped the RM for SOA to software architecture and it is abstract, is this correct and relevant?  How can a human interface with a SOAP node?  Since a human actor that invokes a service by using a SOAP client is invisible to the service tier, it is probably not correct or relevant as worded.  I think I know what you are trying to say though.

But SOA is not necessarily Web services and the consumer somewhere along
the line is likely to be a human.  OTOH, given Mechanical Turk
(
http://mturk.amazon.com), you never know when there will be a human
in the loop.


> - a service consumer can invoke any
> number of services (including a single service in isolation) and can
> chain the output of some services to act as the input of others;
> DN: save this thought for RA.

yes, but the question is whether some things that will be explored more
fully in RA should be mentioned for completeness (or not leaving our
readers feel something is missing).

> - from the perspective of a given
> service, the occurrence of such chaining would not be visible;
> DN: agree
>
> - the service consumer can be implementing a business process;
> DN: or an unbounded array of other
> options.

agreed and can make this any process, such as a business process, where
"business" itself can be anything you want it to be.

> - the specific of a business process
> do not change the basic SOA concepts as described in the RM; however, the
> specific architecture that one designs and implements will reflect the
> business process and make use of specific service instances that
> corresponds to the real world effects that the business process hopes to
> realize.
> DN: concur.

I think this is a point that needs to be made to avoid the question of
whether something is missing.

> Now that said, and in full
> appreciation that we agreed earlier that mechanisms which combine
> services (e.g. choreography, orchestration) are out of scope, is it
> sufficient for words, such as those suggested above, to be included
> somewhere within the current discussion or do we need to pull it out into
> a subsection on its own?  As an example of the former, we tried to
> deal with loose-coupling and coarse-grained with words at the end of
> Section 2.1.
> DN: We used to
> have such words.  Are they out of the doc now?
>  

I think there are a few words left in Section 3.2.1 but I wonder if these
are too little and too buried.

>  
>
> D

K2 (my wife is K)

--
     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  /   Ken Laskey                                                                \
 |    MITRE Corporation, M/S H305    phone:  703-983-7934   |
 |    7515 Colshire Drive                    fax:      703-983-1379   |
  \   McLean VA 22102-7508                                              /
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------