RE: WSDL

["Andrea Westerinen" <andreaw@cisco.com>]

Margaret, 
What is valuable is to have commonality between the 80% of the products
that are indeed common, and allow the 20% value-add to still be defined.
One example where this is happening is in the storage space with SNIA's
Storage Mgmt Initiative, where the vendors have created a
"StorageConfigurationService" that takes "SettingData" as input.  The
SettingData can be subclassed/extended but does not have to be.  The
value for the end users is that you can use existing/standard
applications and tools out-of-the-box, and improve performance or add
functionality by taking advantage of the vendor's extensions to the
SettingData. 

This is but one example. Other advantages are knowing what a class'
general semantics are, based on its position in the object hierarchy.
So, knowing that something is subclassed from "StatisticalData" and
related to an element X, means that you know something about the data as
statistics (but not necessarily the specifics).  I think that this is
useful because you also have inherited methods about how to reset the
counters and gauges, etc.  These don't have to be redefined with each
new extension.

Andrea 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xmlconf@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-xmlconf@ops.ietf.org] On
Behalf Of Margaret Wasserman
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 7:12 AM
To: John Strassner
Cc: 'Ayyasamy, Senthilkumar (UMKC-Student)'; Allen, Keith;
xmlconf@ops.ietf.org
Subject: RE: WSDL



Hi John,

At 04:57 PM 4/16/2003 -0600, John Strassner wrote:
>If WSDL existed, then it would abstract the CLI, so that heterogeneous
>boxes having different CLIs could actually interoperate. And yes, it 
>actually is being used in practice, and not just in ecommerce.

I'm not really sure that it is possible to abstract the CLI to the point
where you hide differences between boxes without eliminating the reasons
why CLI is used in the first place.

When we talked to operators about why they use CLI (despite the fact
that they _hate_ screen scraping, etc.), they consistently said that
they need a single mechanism that provides access to all of the
configuration information on a device.  Today, CLI is the only mechanism
that meets that need.

When you try to abstract a network device (i.e. to a generic "router"),
you inevitably abstract away some of the pieces that are specific to
that device and/or vendor-proprietary.  Unfortunately, those
device-specific and vendor-proprietary pieces do need to be configured.

Margaret





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