RE: FW: I-D ACTION:draft-weijing-netconf-interface-00.txt

["Allen, Keith" <Keith_Allen@labs.sbc.com>]

> >>>>> Randy Presuhn writes:
> 
> Randy> I don't know what Keith has in mind or whether he's proposing
> Randy> anything, but an XSD would not be terribly well-suited to
> Randy> representing the semantic constraints on the objects referred
> Randy> to by the arguments of a method associated with an object.
> 
> I have not read the current netconf document (well the one from the
> xmlconf folks) - but the previous one did not have a mechanism to
> invoke methods as far as I recall.
> 
> /js
> 
> --
> Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
> <http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen,
> Germany

Juergen, and anyone else,

What is your feeling here?  When both the CMIP and SNMP folks decided that
the ASN.1 data definition language alone was not enough, they each developed
their own object definition language of sorts.  I have heard that the CMIP
folks debated quite a bit over the need to support the ability to define and
invoke methods on objects but ended up supporting the ability with the
M-Action capability.  I don't know if the SNMP folks debated it but they
didn't end up supporting a way to define and invoke methods on objects.  If
you look at CMIP information models, there are surprisingly few custom
methods defined for the objects.  And some of the more often used methods,
such as setting up a connection, could have just as easily been done with a
standard "create" method.

I lean towards using standard create, delete, get, set only, mainly because
I think trying to devise a way of defining methods on objects in XML schema
will be too painful and not worth the complexity.  I know this is not truly
object-oriented, but I think it is reasonable given that the answer is XML.
I do support, however, trying to view the elements in an XML infoset as
object as much as possible.

Keith Allen
SBC Labs
9505 Arboretum Blvd.
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 372-5741
keith_allen@labs.sbc.com
 



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