You look at things from a different perspective I guess. What I want:

1 - make sure that the same terminology is in use across avalon
documentation and specification and that it also means the same thing

2 - make it easy for the user to figure out what the documentation
actually means by providing terminology definitions

in order to do this, we need *some* form of definition for words
commonly in use. "container", "entity" etc are used a lot. You (and PH)
suggest that is an argument not to provide a definition, where it seems
to me these are exactly the terms a user will wonder about when reading
them and will want to look them up.

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 12:42, Peter Donald wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 00:39, Leo Simons wrote:
> > container: An active entity that manages component lifecycles and
> > performs low-level functions
> 
> -1 on using the term Container in anything but the most abstract terms (ie an 
> entity that hosts components). Different architectures tend to define the 
> term container to mean different things completely. ie CORBA Adaptors are 
> termed EJB Containers, each EJB-JAR partition is often refurred to as a 
> container and the whole EJB application server as a whole is often referred 
> to as a container. 
> 
> That is only one facet. Try using the same terminology across domains and all 
> sorts of inconsistencies arise. 

All terminology I suggested is, I think, applicable to all of avalon. It
might be silly that the EJB notion of container is different from the
CORBA notion which is again different from the avalon notion, but it is
better to have a stated definition of an avalon container as opposed to
a de facto definition (ie "a container in avalon is like a container in
EJB or CORBA, but only it is different and in merlin it means something
else (implementation of a Container interface) from Phoenix"), as we
have currently.

> > entity: part of the computer hardware and/or software system
> 
> -1
> 
> Entitys is too generic a term

yet it is often used in docs....

> and it often used to refer to concepts other 
> that what you define it to refer to.

...I couldn't figure out a more generic definition of the term that
still made any sense whatsoever....

> > resource: any entity or combination of entities
> 
> -1
> 
> see above. And repeat for oodles more terms you used ;)

It's not primarily me who uses them. It's just me trying to provide an
explanation of what they actually mean.

I don't get it. You use words, but then when someone wants to provide an
explanation of the words (or asks you to do so), you think the words are
too 'generic' or 'vague' to be explanatory....which means your use of
the words would also be too 'generic' and 'vague'. We'll still be living
in babylon....

Anyways, it is possible to have too much discussion I guess. I'll just
add a big fat disclaimer when (if) I get around to writing a terminology
page =)

cheers,

Leo



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