RE: [wsrp][wsia][wsrp-wsia joint interfaces][Draft Spec 0.43]Terminology

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

Title: Message

A taxonomy question mainly to the WSRP folks (Thomas, Mike, ...).

 

I think everybody is pretty much on the same page with regards to the term "session" which identifies the transient state. (And, as Rich noted, to people that come from an OO background, this would be the same as an object instance).

 

The tougher one is the persistent key, which in WSRP is typically referred to as "instance", but as Rich noted this may be non-intuitive to people from an OO background (who think of transient object instances), and hence the need for a new term.

 

Would you find the following, radically simplified, suggestion for an operation name intrusive:

 

createPortlet

 

Along those lines, a portal would call the operation createPortlet, would get back a (persistent) portletID and then (optionally) call createSession with the portletID.

 

Note that using this taxonomy, a portlet is the "last persistent instance". So, multiple instances of the same mail portlet are multiple portlets.

 

A few justification points:

1. IBM's RPWS proposal used the term createInstance. However, clearly the term "instance" is meaningless by itself - an instance is always an instance of something, in this case I assume the intent was a shortcut for createPortletInstance. Hence, createPorlet conveys a similar meaning.

2. The ability to create a persistent key seems to be only under the scope of WSRP and not under WSIA. WSIA supports a persistent key to create sessions and to subsequent operations, but wouldn't probably deal with how they are created and management (with all the associated issues that are well described in Mike's latest summary). Hence, the motivation to use a portal-specific name.

 

Any thoughts from hard-core portal people?

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Thompson [mailto:richt2@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 3:26 PM
To: wsia@lists.oasis-open.org; wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [wsrp][wsia][wsrp-wsia joint interfaces][Draft Spec 0.43] Terminology

Presuming the 2nd case to get dropped relative to the previous set of
emails, I would propose this section call out how we will refer to these
things throughout the remainder of the document/API. In particular, I would
suggest:
      Session Information - This is carried opaquely in the interface as a
      "sessionID".
      => goes away
      Persistent Information - This is carried opaquely in the interface as
      a "handle".

Rather than "Manifestation", I would propose using "Entity" to describe the
thing from which markup may be requested. I think it has the right level of
opacity (Consumer has no idea what kind of entity it is) while carrying
appropriate semantics (a thing that may be interacted with). Using these
terms, there was also an open question at the end of our last call related
to whether there were both persistent and transient entities ...

If we are going to support explicit lifecycle for both of these, I would
propose:
   handle   createEntity(handle, propertyValues)
   sessionID   createSession(handle, propertyValues)

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