RE: Closing on NIM requirements

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

At 13:40 16.04.2000 -0700, Durham, David wrote:
>I agree SNMP can indirectly and inefficiently simulate methods in that you
>can set a bunch of OIDs (call them arguments), set the runMethod OID (call
>the method), and then poll/get the result OID (or trigger a report). But
>LDAP as an RPC model??? Not a chance.

sorry; horse ran out of the barn the moment we added free extensibility to 
LDAPv3. People are doing it....
I agree 100% that neither LDAP nor SNMP are good modelling languages; 
that's not their target. (The SMI is a modelling language, but IMHO a weak one)
A modelling language needs to model both data stuff and operations stuff.

>Nonetheless, operations still require the attributes/classes (data) to be
>defined as well. So my question then becomes, shouldn't there be two models,
>one declarative model for the attributes and then another model for the use
>of those attributes within operations?

UML, from my brief acquaintance, has about half a dozen different modelling 
methods, all better at showing some properties of the system than others.
One OO credo (or at least part of one) is that data and operations need to 
be closely bound together, because neither is understandable without the 
other; I subscribe to that.

One model. Possibly many description techniques.

                   Harald

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no