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Consumers, Services, Messages

Stefan Tilkov,

Savas tries to make up his mind about which camp — REST or the rest :-) — he belongs to. He takes issue with the influence of using terms such as client, server, consumer and interface when talking about service-oriented architectures … interesting stuff. I disagree that it’s always services that exchange messages; I believe that e.g. some UI code that uses a services is more of a consumer than a service of its own. And I also don’t have any problem with the very abstract term interface (which is a lot better than the ridiculous portType of WSDL 1.1); I believe it makes a lot of sense to distinguish between an abstract service contract, which I would define as interface semantics + policy, and its concrete instantiation at a specific endpoint.

But it’s fascinating to see the topic of language influencing thought process come up two times in one day, although the other occurrence deals with a somewhat different topic :-)