Subject: processing points in draft-beck-opes-irml-03

From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 09:37:12 -0600 (MDT)

Is the concept of a "processing point" application-agnostic? If it is
application-specific, it should be removed from the
application-agnostic spec (draft-beck-opes-irml-03).

If we believe that every application protocol has some "processing
points", then the definition of HTTP-specific points should probably
be moved from draft-beck-opes-irml-03 to an HTTP binding for IRML. It
may also be more appropriate to migrate from numbers to tokens/strings
when describing application-specific points.

Alex.

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From: Andre Beck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 16:44:13 -0400

> application-agnostic spec (draft-beck-opes-irml-03).

I think the concept of processing points is indeed application agnostic, 
even though each application protocol may have different processing 
points. This depends, for example, on whether or not an OPES processor 
can implement a cache for the application protocol and on the 
request/response scheme of the application protocol.

> when describing application-specific points.

Yes, I think application-specific processing points should be defined in 
the corresponding application protocol binding for IRML, but I still 
think that it makes sense to define a general mechanism of how to 
specify processing points in IRML rules in the IRML spec. Is this what 
you had in mind as well?

-Andre

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 16:24:59 -0600 (MDT)

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Andre Beck wrote:

> Yes, I think application-specific processing points should be
> defined in the corresponding application protocol binding for IRML,
> but I still think that it makes sense to define a general mechanism
> of how to specify processing points in IRML rules in the IRML spec.
> Is this what you had in mind as well?

Yes, kind of. It all depends on the overall language design. With the
current design, we have to describe "processing point" as a general
concept/attribute (without defining any application-specific values).
This is because the current draft makes this particular attribute
special compared to other "properties". You have already explained the
motivation behind this design.

An alternative is a an approach where "processing point" becomes just
one of the application-specific properties and requires no special
treatment or even documentation in the IRML Core. Application-specific
interpreters or compilers would be free to treat/optimize this
property specially, of course.

Alex.