[wsia] [wsrp] [wsrp-wsia joint interfaces] sessions/entities

[Alan Kropp <akropp@epicentric.com>]

Here's my thinking on this topic based on our discussion from Tuesday, and
I'd like to make the plug that we come to consensus on this point soon.

Transient runtime data lives in a session associated with the Producer (WSRP
portlet container).  Typically the consumer makes an explicit request to the
Producer to create a session.  A producer has the ability to create a
session implicitly, at which point the consumer MUST (MAY?) scope subsequent
requests by including the ID for this  implicit session.

An entity is the runtime representation (manifestation?) of a Producer
service (WSRP portlet), and is identified by an opaque reference.  The
consumer makes an explicit request to the producer to create an entity, and
makes requests of that entity, possibly scoped to a session (see above), for
markup and/or action routing.

The producer determines how to relate entities to sessions and vice versa.
In the portlet case, the container MAY (and most likely will?) maintain a
single session on behalf of a single consumer's interaction with all
entities under its management.  Transient data is 'partitioned' according to
some as-yet unidentified scheme, so that the producer may apply the correct
end-user runtime state as the context for a given request.

Thoughts?

Alan