Hi Mark,
On Feb 24, 2006, at 5:34 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
> On 2/23/06, Jan Algermissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> But I cannot figure out, what it means that an interface is "well
>> defined". Especially I do not understand what an interface is that is
>> *not* well defined.
>>
>> Can someone shed some light on this?
>
> IMO, it's well defined if it's self-descriptive. WSDL, WS-Policy,
> RDF, etc.. won't help as a descriptive framework if what is being
> described is entirely proprietary, e.g. proprietary operations,
> proprietary data formats, proprietary QoS descriptions, ...
> Self-descriptive means everything is standardized.
In the context of RESTs programming model ("hypertext as the engine
of application state"), does your 'everything' include link semantics?
IMHO it must, because otherwise the consumer could not understand the
meaning of traversing a given hypertext link. And the linking
semantics were not standardized, there would be an (undesirable)
implicit shared knowledge between consumer and service provider.
In this context, I think it is interesting that while HTML is
standardized, the link semantics of individual Web applications are
not (e.g. there is no standard that defines the semantics of Google's
'Cached' link). Humans have very few problems with this (at least
when they are familiar with the application domain) but I wonder if
this can be applied to machine to machine communication. Maybe a
relatively small set of shared property definitions (e.g. RDF
schemas) would do.
Anyhow, just mumbeling...
Jan
> Mark.
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________________________________________________________________________
_______________
Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer
http://jalgermissen.com
Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT'
http://www.tugboat.de
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