On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:31 AM, Colin Jack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Sending references is, of course, also of great value. But from the >> point of view of the article which motivated this thread, I believe >> what the author was trying to say - similar to my blog post - is that >> if the sender wants the message to convey certain information, that >> information needs to be in the message itself, not referenced. You >> would include references only when the reference itself is what you >> want to communicate, not whatever value the reference currently >> dereferences to. >> > > I'm interested in how far you take this approach because on systems > I've worked on, admittedly not necessarily examples of best practice > as far as SOA/messaging, it seems like the self-contained messages > approach can bring you to a situation where the provider is sending > large amounts of data in messages.
That can happen, sure, but only because you've presumably determined that you want/need to convey a lot of information in a single message. If you don't *need* to, and large messages are a burden, then don't use them. > Going back and trying to reduce the message size/complexity after the > fact can become very difficult so although consumer-driven contracts > may improve the process I am drawn towards Steve's approach of having > a minimum reference set in the message and then references to non-core > information. What do you mean by "non-core"? If you mean that the references are to data that isn't part of the information you're trying to convey to the recipient, then sure, that's what I've been talking about; use references for that stuff. > > I'd also wonder whether the consumer couldn't also be getting events > relating to the referenced resource, if so the reference in the > message is all we need because it can act as an identifier for > information that we already have. Not tried that approach though, > perhaps its got major issues in practice? Hmm, I don't follow. Mark.
