Actual vs. Described Interfaces
February 17, 2005
It is rare that software that re-uses an interface description will have fewer constraints than the description.
While I agree with most of the post, I’m not sure about this particular paragraph. I believe once services are re-used, it’s unavoidable that a service contract will offer both more operations (if you have something like that) and data that the re-using application actually needs.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on February 17, 2005 10:47 PM. The previous post in this blog was And Now for Something Completely Different: REST vs. WS-*. The next post in this blog is SOA Days 2005. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
Stefan, I believe you are in agreement with DaveO - he says most services will be more constraining than just the interface description, and you say that the interface description will have more options (fewer constraints) than the service.
Posted by: Jacek at February 24, 2005 10:35 AM | link
Jacek, I had to ponder this for a while, but I believe I did not misunderstand him. Consider a service implementation that corrects zip codes in addresses. It has constraints for the address only. Can I pass an invoice document to it, and have it correct billing and shipping address for me?
Depending on my infrastructure, I may be able to deploy the existing address-correcting implementation as a service implementation for correcting invoice addresses. It’ll have less restrictions in its implementation than the schema suggests.
Right?
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at February 24, 2005 2:06 PM | link