On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Phillip Warner wrote:
> Doug said:
>> I just want to amplify this point. It appears that everyone agrees >> that it is a good thing to separate the messaging mechanism from >> the message content; the messaging infrastructure shouldn't know or >> care what is in the message, it just delivers it. We can go one step >> further and specify that the infrastructure just delivers the message >> payload as an opaque blob of some sort, and it is up to another layer >> of software to compose or interpret the message.
> To take this a step further, if you use, e.g., Java interfaces, you can
> specify what the underlying messaging infrastructure should be capable
> of, and leave it up to the programmer to implement the details. This
> way you can specify that the underlying protocol should have the
> ability to, e.g., use transactions, guarantee delivery, yada, etc. In
> essence, the interface is the contract-wrapper around the underlying
> protocol.
This is the idea (except the part about Java). That is, we formally specify interface separately from implementation. There was a lot of discussion of this in the earlier round of discussions several weeks ago.