How about "Service Invokers"?
Kind Regards,
Joseph Chiusano
Booz Allen Hamilton
Visit us online@ http://www.boozallen.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew MacKenzie [mailto:]
> Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 9:19 PM
> To: Thomas Erl
> Cc:
> Subject: Re: [soa-rm] Requesters vs. Consumers
>
> Consistency with other work aside, "request" strongly
> suggests how service consumption is initiated, and that is
> why I don't want to use it.
>
> Regards,
> Matt
> Thomas Erl wrote:
>
> > It's probably a good time to think about which term we
> should use to
> > represent the potential element responsible for invoking or
> initiating
> > a conversation with a service acting as the service provider.
> > Regardless of whether this becomes an "official" element within our
> > reference model, we will likely need to reference such an
> element in
> > our documentation.
> >
> > Below are some considerations we can take into account:
> >
> > - Both of the position papers submitted so far incorporate the term
> > "consumer". This term is also used in the ebSOA specification.
> >
> > - The W3C Web Services Architecture document submitted by
> Frank McCabe
> > uses the term "requester" and further qualifies it by suffixing it
> > with "entity" or "agent" to represent the owner and
> software program
> > respectively. (Prior to the current version of the W3C
> Working Note,
> > this document used the term "service requester" instead of
> "requester
> > agent".)
> >
> > - The W3C Web Services Glossary does not provide a definition for
> > "consumer", but defines "requester agent" as follows: "A software
> > agent that wishes to interact with a provider agent in order to
> > request that a task be performed on behalf of its owner - the
> > requester entity."
> >
> > - The term "requester agent" is used in the W3C WSDL 2.0
> > specification, whereas "consumer" is used in the WSDL 1.1 version.
> >
> > - The definitions document submitted by Rebekah uses the term
> > "requester", most likely because the initial set of
> definitions were
> > provided by Frank.
> >
> > Given that we are seeking industry-wide acceptance of our reference
> > model, there may be a benefit to keeping our terminology in
> alignment
> > with terms already in use by established (albeit
> > implementation-specific) specifications. I personally have no
> > preference, but I do recommend we decide on one term and
> then consider
> > adding a definition to our glossary. We may want to
> leverage some of
> > the work performed by the W3C Working Group and decide
> whether we also
> > need separate terms to distinguish owner from implementation.
> >
> > On a related note, we have not yet discussed the concept of
> a service
> > or service agent assuming provider and requester/consumer
> roles. Such
> > a concept would also affect our definitions.
> >
> > Thomas
> >
> >
>
>
