[jsdl-wg] Activity schema requirements

[Donal K. Fellows]

Alexander Papaspyrou wrote:
> Steven Newhouse wrote:
>> There is a lot of information going on here... how important is it that the information is
>> recorded in one document as opposed to recording where the information can be
>> obtained? It would seem a lot better that the BES endpoint remains the definitive
>> source of the job status rather than some other document floating around the system...
>> otherwise maintaining any form of consistency would be very hard IMHO.
> 
> I agree that there should be a fixed endpoint for retrieval. But which
> BES would we use? Plus, will the service that initially creates an
> activity instance for a client request have a BES interface no matter
> what?

As I understand it, the "fixed endpoint" could actually just be a front
that uses something like WS-Naming to redirect to the endpoint for the
repository that is actually serving the information. However, from the
perspective of JSDL, I think we shouldn't be worrying about this at all
(officially); it's part of the service implementation and not the data
representation. (OK, I know we have the fact that we want to make some
services in mind when we write this, but we don't have to solve it all.)

On the point of consistency, I'd just ignore it! To be precise, if the
data is being collected from across some sort of distributed system,
there is no way to guarantee that it is consistent (messages do get lost
and delayed; you can't avoid it). I'd instead state that the information
is only ever of "best effort" quality unless it specifically states
otherwise.

Donal.