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Friday, November 19, 2004 "Design by Contract" or "Contract First"? I'm trying to clean up some terminology that I've been using in the Awesome(tm) method. The latest is the term "design by contract(tm)". This is a term that Bertrand Meyer coined (and trademarked). He used it in the context of object oriented programming where the focus was on "pre- and post-conditions and class invariants". Don Box, Christian Weyer and others have favored the term "contract first" to describe a similar concept more suitable to web services. Here the focus has been on giving a service the ability to advertise: - Type definitions - Message definitions - Operations (inbound and outbound) - Message Exchange Patterns (e.g., request/response) - Interfaces (groups of operations) - Bindings However, it is apparent that the contract goes beyond the basic wsdl stuff. It must also include: - Pre-conditions / post-condition assertions - Non-functional policies (security, reliability, transactional integrity) - Hosted service level agreements (availability, latency) - Synchronicity capabilities (asynch, synch or bi-synch) Eventually the contracts will include stuff like: - Semantic ontology (or other semantic broker) - Costing /recharge functions - Estimates to run service (think big-O) - Preferred translator service (don't understand SOAP 1.5, but do understand SOAP 1.3) - Code mobility agreements - Service-to-service automated recompilation agreements (HotSpot for SO) - Service dependencies (other services and resources) (many of these will show up as standardized interfaces implemented by a service container) I guess what I'm saying is that "design by contract" doesn't mean the same thing that we are talking about in the service oriented world. Hence, "Contract First" it is! ----- Here's one to ponder... what pieces of the contract should be in a document format (like WSDL) versus in an interface format (like ws-mex). Or should they be in both? Why doesn't WSDL have a WSDL interface: getOperations()?? Is the ws-mex, getMetadata() the right way to go? Or should you look at it as an enterprise vocabulary problem? "GET" + "OPERATION" (think ws-transfer). Or is it a semantic ontology problem where you have "GET" and a pre-condition stating you can only get things that 'are a kind of' "METADATA"... Well, doesn't really matter - looks like we will have every combination possible. :-) posted by jeff | 6:45 AM Thursday, November 18, 2004 One of my favorites... One of my favorite posts: http://schneider.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_schneider_archive.html#90283350 (still waiting). posted by jeff | 8:30 AM |
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