Lance,
Sorry for the late email, we had an email outage last night. If not
sure if this is still relevant now given your earlier email exchanges
with Assaf, but see my comments below to further clarify what I meant.
Lance Waterman wrote:
I think what I hear you saying is that you want to be able to aggregate
several versions of a BPEL process into a single service interface. Such
that this aggregated service interface can serve as the interface for
several BPEL process versions. I understand this however, what do you
propose when the operation+endpoint are identical between process
versions?
How does the engine know which one to route to ( and I don't want to
require
a change to the client )?
Not really. I simply want to be able to deploy and activate P(v1) and
P(v2) simultaneously if they have no conflicting operation+endpoint
tuples. This is a development convenience and also leaves the
flexibility and responsibility to the author of the processes to define
what a "version" means.
The only real requirement that I see is for the engine to be able to
detect conflicts during activation to prevent non-deterministic routing
cases (see below).
Say I change the signature of a Java class, do I need to change its name?
Alex, I think using Java as an analogy is a good way to convey
patterns/concepts however, when it's posted as a rhetorical question like
this I think it comes across a bit condescending. I'm sure that wasn't
your
intent but none the less it doesn't work for me. Now, to move forward
with
your analogy, if I were able to deprecate ( i.e. retire ) specific
operations - is that where you are going? Is this something that shows
up in
the service interface? Does the operation just stop working for
deprecated
operations?
My apologies, Lance, I did not mean to offend.
To answer your questions, I do not see a need to deprecate/retire
individual initiating operations within a process. I think a process
should either be completely activated or completely retired, meaning
that all of its initiating operations should be either enabled or
disabled. And if one or more operation+endpoint conflicts with any
other activated process (across all versions), the engine should prevent
the activation of the process.
regards,
alex
