Web service standards question - mandatory vs optional

[Martin Hill]

Andre Schaaff wrote:
> In answer to the previous interesting mails of today morning, i think that we
> need to define in the coming months something like a VO Web Service Basic
> profile (will be discussed friday). We are all developping WS and we need to
> follow a few basic rules (what is mandatory, optional, optional but recommanded,
> ...)
> VObs Support Interfaces begins to indicate that heartbeat is mandatory,
> log-harvesting is optional, ....
> We must go further in this way (object or VOTable for tabular data, etc.)
> This implies also to provide tools to check the compliance to VO WS recommandations.

A set of 'administration' like minimum features for VO services sounds good. 
Agreeing which ones are mandatory and which are not might take some time...

For example, the optional 'describing itself in VO terms' (ie returning 
VOResource) is surely necessary to make the VO work, yet I don't see how 
heartbeat is mandatory to making the VO work!  For mission critical systems yes, 
but the VO is hardly mission critical.  Where are the heartbeats going to go? 
What is monitoring them?  What alarms will be raised and where when a heartbeat 
fails?

I suspect 'heartbeat' is not what is being meant, and this is really a 
'getStatus' or 'getAvailability' in which case we ought to rename it. A 
'heartbeat' is a pushed status message over a regular period (like monitoring a 
casualty's heartbeat), and there may be a case of having this in some services 
so we should not use the wrong term.

Mr Pedantic

-- 
Martin Hill
www.mchill.net
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