In the interest of sanity and progress, I have broken up Rich's, Michael's, Monica's and Eilon's emails into four subjects - Shared Transient Information , Persistent Information Scope , createEntity/createTemplate/createPortlet , session and entity handles , and Property lists . This email will deal with Session and Entity Handles , and the relevant quotes from the emails and my reply to them: Rich wrote: > Rather than Manifestation , I would propose using Entity to describe the > thing from which markup may be requested. I think it has the right level of > opacity (Consumer has no idea what kind of entity it is) while carrying > appropriate semantics (a thing that may be interacted with). Using these > terms, there was also an open question at the end of our last call related > to whether there were both persistent and transient entities ... > > If we are going to support explicit lifecycle for both of these, I would > propose: > handle createEntity(handle, propertyValues) > sessionID createSession(handle, propertyValues) Eilon wrote: > think everybody is pretty much on the same page with regards to the term session > which identifies the transient state. (And, as Rich noted, to people that come from > an OO background, this would be the same as an object instance). > > The tougher one is the persistent key, which in WSRP is typically referred to as > instance , but as Rich noted this may be non-intuitive to people from an OO > background (who think of transient object instances), and hence the need for a > new term. > > Would you find the following , radically simplified , suggestion for an operation name intrusive : > > createPortlet > [...] > Wouldn't you tend to think that ID hints towards persistence and Handle hints > towards transience and not vice-versa? So now Gil writes: Actually, my Manifestation was meant to describe what is in this email roundup described as session , while I think Rich thought it was about the persistent thingie, but a s discussed in a previous email, the persistent entity is (arguably) a solely WSRP concept, so given that, and given Eilon's comment, we could change the term from entity to portlet, and stay with session . The question is, what do we call the WSIA ____. A WSIA Service? A WSIA Component? Given that, this is my take on terminology: Portlet - the persistent thingie which WSRP should define in exact terms. WSIA Component - The thing on which you invoke the operations (e.g. the Web Service that includes those operations). Session - the user session the WSIA Component is in when it is running . And my take on the handle/ID issue: sessionHandle = createSession(...) Gil Tayar WebCollage