RE: [wsia] [wsrp] [wsrp-wsia joint interfaces] Merged interfacesdocument

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

Title: Message

Rich,

 

Kudos on the last version of the spec, it reads great and much clearer and cleaner than previous versions.

 

I would like to add my own two questions based on an initial reading of the document.

 

The semantics of "session"

Does a session span all the different portlets/templates/instances provided by a single service? If so, that means that extra care is needed in the case where Producers don't want to share sessions. The most natural example that comes to mind is a simple SOAP gateway that relays requests to multiple even-more-remote Producers. In this case, the gateway has to implement the semantics of session aggregation or do some other manipulation of the message body.

 

Multiple parameters using arrays

I concur with a previous comment that it seems unnatural to duplicate every parameter of every call just for the sake of a single network communication. Beyond being unnatural, this also requires the Consumer do to work, and apropos an earlier discussion, would practically preclude using SOAP exceptions (if the Consumer gets an exception, this essentially means that one of of the many services may have failed, and this isn't the regular semantics of exceptions).

Unless I am missing something, this networking issue can be solved by the layer that created it (the transport layer) using for example HTTP 1.1. Although existing SOAP frameworks probably don't have built-in support for this, since we are talking about a single generic proxy for all WSRP services, I see no reason why this should be particularly challenging to accomplish. This would also allow multiplexing of different calls (to operations with different signature) without requiring to open a new connection.

 

In general (regarding both of those comments), let's not forget that portal interoperability is an important objective of this committee - but it's just one. The other, which is as important, is to allow ISVs and end customers to create portlets that can work across portals. We have to ensure that the specification does not practically preclude this second objective by optimizing the interface for the first.

 

Eilon

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Thompson [mailto:richt2@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, June 07, 2002 3:38 PM
To: wsia@lists.oasis-open.org; wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [wsia] [wsrp] [wsrp-wsia joint interfaces] Merged interfaces document

Here is a draft of the merged interfaces document that Carsten and I have
been working on this week. The largest conceptual change from the previous
0.44 Joint Spec Draft is the appearance of arrays in most of the
operations. This allows Consumers on the scale of portals to efficiently
interact with Producer services.

(See attached file: WSIA - WSRP Interface Specification.doc)