Re: service stereotype thingies

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Hoennig "(mi)" <mi sun com> writes:

> Hi Maciej,
> 
> > > btw i don't like the term service, too. We should think about sth.
> > > better (stereotype?).
> 
> > I don't like the terms "stereotype" or "service" ("stereotype" is
> > better because it's less likely to be confused with other things.
> 
> Oh no! Please not "stereotype"! A stereotype is the term used for meta 
> types in UML. "interface" for example is a stereotype, "structure" and 
> "exception" too, as "enum" is and, finally OpenOffice's "service" is a 
> stereotype" as well.
> 
> The thing which's name you don't like, specifies a certain service 
> implementation promise to offer. I really don't see, why you don't like 
> the term. 

Your arguments have some value, but the term "service" is pretty
overloaded. First, a CORBA object implementation is often called a
"server" or sometimes "service". Second, "service" to me implies
something that sits around listening on a socket, like httpd. So when
someone said "the gconf service" I would think "do they mean gconfd
the daemon, or do they mean the set of interfaces that any
implementation of the GConf IDL promises to offer"?

But of course, nearly any name is overloaded.

Here are some other possible terms:

* type (from a proposal for COM)
* meta-interface
* type-spec
* object-spec
* service-spec
* object-description


> BTW: We have several interfaces which deal with services, I 
> think it would be stupid to change those (of cause they have "service" in 
> their identifier) just because somebody does not like the name. If we 
> merge BONOBO and OpenOffice API, we will have hard times to explain to 
> those developers who have existing code on our API, anyway. I don't see 
> any logical reason to make transition even harder.
> 

Since Sun asked the GNOME project to rename every method in our IDL, I
do not have much sympathy. :-)

(BTW I will do the same rename in OAF and with approval from the
maintainer do the same for Nautilus if Miguel and Michael actually go
through with it).

I think you will have to break interfaces anyway, because in GNOME we
cannot specify services at the IDL level, since that is not OMG IDL
compliant.

How about service-spec (or service_spec, or serviceSpec) as a
compromise. It's close to what you have, but less likely to be
confusing as to what it means.

 - Maciej