Great example, Gregg. When I traveled from the US to the UK and had some tea, I clearly recognised which tea I was having (because US tea was always with ice :-) )
I know two major approach to new things: one is follow after people, another one - lead people. In architecture of building and landscape, you can put the path-ways up-front placing some grass around them or you can leave the grass everywhere and see where people prefer to cross the place. Both approaches are valid. The ony one thing is hidden in the latter case - people do not cross the place accidentally, they go to some targets. That is, the architect put targets outside of place deliberately, i.e., once again, people where led but implicitly. We have several standard bodies and chap developers. Developers adopted the meaning of 'contract' following WSDL/Web Service specification. Technical Committees in OASIS, OMG and The Open Group shifting for interpretation of SOA service as Web Service and they, correspondingly, change the semantic of 'contract'. I think it is valid process and result. Now, we have the legacy interpretation and standardised one. Which one we better use for avoiding ambiguity? There nothing wrong with ATG's nucleous but the standard named the same functionality Servlets. The same is here, plus, as you know, the standard bodies have started the process of mapping/matching between their ontologies for the same reason - reduce ambiguity. In this case, I simply surprised by ignorance demonstrated with regard to the standards. Everything has to have its own semantic and it used to change depending on the context (it is a feature of many languages including English). I think you are playing with words a bit because "anything useful" means different things to different people. What is not useful for you, may be useful for me, with or without "additional qualification" - Michael P.S. 'contract' is not only "a hint of a formal agreement", it is agreement between two or more parties. How an interface exposed by the service provider alone can become an agreement? With whom? Consumers must take it but this does not mean they agree with this particular interface syntax and semantics. So, using 'contract' in place of interface in not much scientific, if you want. ________________________________ From: Gregg Wonderly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 10:05:34 PM Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Re: Service Façade Michael Poulin wrote: > Sure, Anne. I prefer OASIS SOA definition and it is my business to > promote it. BTW there is one more OASIS standard on the way (public > draft) on SOA Ontology, and they also in sync with OASIS SOA (thanks > God!). So, my 'flexibility' is in that I prefer to setup the terms > before the conversation though this is not easy some times. If I tell a story about traveling from the US to the UK and having some chips and tea in the afternoon, what would you think I meant when I said "chips"? Is it the US chip, or the european chip? Would the place that I was born affect your assumption? Terms and standard phrases are always nice, but if they are not uniformly understood and globally equal in definition, than one has a harder time having a conversation with them. The word "contract" is not a well defined and uniformly understood (one meaning and application) term. So, it's not really productive to use it for anything more than a hint of a formal agreement. Lawyers and language specialists/ majors often qualify the use of such terms because they know that the single word is easy to say, but doesn't easily convey any particular meaning without additional qualification. This is what makes SOA a non-starter. It doesn't convey anything useful without additional qualification, and once you start down that path, the conversation will inevitably touch all kinds of places that make it much richer in content and meaning to the two parties because they used more descriptive terms and phrases that help each other see very specific detail. Gregg Wonderly
