Re: [grobj] Referral definition and its purpose?

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 5/18/10 5:01 AM, Sheng Jiang wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> We are now working on an referral PS draft, targeting to submit end of May
> or the beginning of June. We'd like to discuss the relevant contents/topic
> publicly in the mail list during our writing. Comments or contributions are
> more than welcome.
>
> The first target is to understand what is referral and its purpose. There
> may be different understanding, our goal here is to find a common definition
> for our PS draft. The following is my understanding and what's in the draft
> now.
>
> In abstract: The purpose of a referral is to enable a given entity in a
> multiparty Internet application to pass information to another party. It
> enables a communication initiator to aware relevant information of its
> destination entity before launching the communication.
>
> In the introduction: A frequently occurring situation is that one entity A
> connected to the Internet (or to some private network using the Internet
> protocol suite) needs to inform another entity B how to reach either A
> itself or some third-party entity C. This is known as a referral.
>
> Does everyone can agree on this Referral definition and its purpose? Only if
> consensus can reach here, our next discussion for referral scenarios can
> make sense.
I would define the scope as somewhat broader than that.  I think it's
quite reasonable to want to make referrals across application
boundaries.  If one application provides a service that's useful to
another application, I think it's reasonable to pass a referral object
from one application to another.    To say this another way, I think
that these days the boundary between one application and another is
rather arbitrary.

I also think that part of the purpose for standardizing referral objects
is to facilitate referrals between one application and another.  If all
referrals were within the same application, there would be less need to
standardize the object, as each application could develop its own.

Another purpose in standardizing referral objects is to allow
standardized APIs to manipulate referral objects and to allow those APIs
to be reusable across multiple applications. However IETF doesn't
usually standardize APIs.  So this by itself might be seen as a weak
justification in IETF circles.

Keith