[wsia] [wsia-glossary] Consumer

[Eilon Reshef <eilon.reshef@webcollage.com>]

Title: Message

On our Friday meeting, we discussed the role of the "Consumer" in a bit more depth, and tried to come up with a few definitions.

Below I tried to summarize the roles we discussed, I hope I captured them accurately.

A Consumer may have multiple roles:

1. Serve as a (visual) container for the Producer
With the purpose of presenting the Producer to an end user in a larger "container" page.

2. Customize and adapt the look-and-feel of the Producer
With the purpose of offering seamless integration with the "container" page.

3. Augment Producer functionality
With the purpose of presenting an integrated application that leverages the Producer functionality (e.g., a bank offering Travelers Checks adds the ability to pay with account debit).

4. Orchestrate multiple Producers
With the purpose of aggregating multiple producers into a compound application (e.g., an Address Book Producer and a Mapping Producer are bound to visually display a person's location).

A few notes:
* Naturally, a Consumer may also (coincidentally) turn back and become a Producer of a larger Web Service, however - this seems to be independent of the basic Producer/Consumer model.
* Although a Consumer typically acts as a "container" for the Producer WSIA Web Service, this is only one aspect of its behavior.

--Eilon