Michael Poulin wrote: > Unfortunately, I have not received this message from Gregg and got it > from the Todd's response. > > I am curious, what API we are talking about in here? Is this a SOA forum > or OO forum?
<my rant> I believe you are being overly narrow in your thinking and response. If all you want to do is discuss SOAP, then go to SOAP forum. If you find value in hearing others perspectives on how they view SOA and how they design and build services than this is a good list for exactly that. If you tire of my relentless Jini and Java make a great SOA platform, and my responses focused around that technology, realize that I probably have the same experience each time I read the same repeatative mantra from those who think that SOAP or REST or ... are THE SOA platform. There is no X is SOA... </my rant> ...Back to discussion... As service has a set of operations that it can provide the user access too. If the service is software and the user is a programmer, than there is an API for some definition of that (beyond the requisit acronym). If the set of operations don't allow the service to be useful, than it needs to have a different set of operations. I'd contend that a service which provides a score for a baseball team, given a date, or another teams name, should have a corresponding operation that allows you to know if such a game exists. Otherwise you are complicating the use of the score operation by burdening the user with having to know how to treat the values returned in two different circumstances. Gregg Wonderly
