Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Conversations Overview

The notion of a conversation is not new in distributed computing systems (or for that matter to human society). Every day we engage in both structured, contextualized conversations such as negotiating for a beer at a bar, and unstructured ad hoc conversations such as asking a work colleague about his plans for the weekend. We are also quite used to having conversations with machines in the form of ATM transactions and similar things (shouting at the monitor when the computer “misbehaves” does not count as a conversation). Take for example a typical barroom scene as shown in Figure 5-1. This is a typical pub situation where a customer orders a drink and goes through a relatively structured conversation with a server. Although ...