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Re: Methods in the NIM requirements



on 04/29/2000 8:48 PM, Andrea Westerinen at andreawest@mindspring.com wrote:

> Now, to answer your questions ....
> As rules of thumb:
> - Class properties represent "data" (Status, CurrentQueues, Counters, etc.).
> - Class methods represent "behavior" (Reconfigure, Save/RestoreState,
> Initialize, etc.).

More as an observation of this thread than anything else, I would say that
everyone would agree with your comments as the 'rule of thumb'. There is one
consideration I see in this case (IETF work) that would cause me to want
even greater care in the definition of any methods.  While the goal is
interoperability, past experience shows that vendors have either great
reluctance or inability or both to deal with even just the attributes.  This
suggests to me the more complex aspects of behavior are even more difficult
to standardize, technically and politically.

>From this perspective, I can see why people might be concerned with methods
and want to ensure that great rigor is used in examining the need for the
definition of any methods. If, as I have in the past, I were defining a
management system, I would certainly start with a full model of the data
that included both attributes and methods.  That may be a slightly different
problem than what we have here though I can see that others might disagree.

/jon