--- In [email protected], "Steve Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > And I'm not betting against the internet (which is the bigger beast) > what I'd say is that I'll go along with Bill Joy when he talked about > multiple different webs, including the business web. There is no > reason that each of these "webs" have to use the same technology > approach as the human->human one. The syndication web is just part of > the person->person web, hence the reason it _should_ work on the same > technology stack. The business web needs to work on the same basis as > businesses to today, this means a lack of trust between organisations, > a high degree of formalism (driven by lawyers) and the importance of > QoS. >
To help stop this list degenerating into "Steve Jones against the world", let me just agree with Steve here and further emphasise this last point, which is a current concern of mine. Most of what goes on in business today is actually quite "tightly coupled". In particular, buying and selling stuff (that is, the general commercial trading activity of most businesses) goes through a strict legal process of contract formation and transaction execution between two parties. This involves well-defined legal concepts such as "invitation to treat", "offer", "acceptance" and "consideration". Businesses define the rules for such things very precisely and this applies equally to B2B and B2C purchasing scenarios as well as transactions of both small and large monetary value. When negotiating these contracts and executing transactions, businesses pay close attention to the details of what is being said. Anything proposed by the other party is subject to detailed scrutiny before being incorporated into the contract terms or allowed to affect the outcome of a transaction. A business would never knowingly execute a contract or transaction, parts of which it did not understand. Of course consumers sometimes do (for low-value items) but only out of laziness (and perhaps stupidity) in reading the "small print" and this does cause them problems in practice. In designing computer systems, we generally try to model the behaviour of the business as closely as possible. It is arguable, therefore (and strongly, in my view) that any computer system designed to automate this kind of commercial business activity must be similarly "tightly coupled". This would mean that messages exchanged as part of a transaction must be fully understood by both parties, and rigorously checked for accuracy and completeness. Each party must be sure that nothing is being said by the other party that may materially affect [in the legal sense] the outcome of the transaction. Both the messages themselves and their interactions must therefore be carefully designed to align properly with the commercial [legal] aspects of the activity they are automating. Of course this doesn't prevent the message definitions from being "extensible" in any way, but it does suggest that the current vogue for loose message definition, sloppy parsing and ignoring data you don't understand may not be appropriate in many business contexts. -Mike Glendinning. P.S. Businesses do, of course in some areas and industries make use of intermediaries to reduce the effects of this "tight coupling" (for example in the various B2B purchasing exchanges), but even so both legs of such brokered transaction remain tightly coupled as I have described.
