2007/06/13
It’s nice to see Pat Helland join the REST/SOA conversation.
His first post is in a rather quisical, loose style that I hadn’t seen before, but that’s ok, I think I get what he’s talking about. The point seems to be summed up here;
Is the purchase-order (or even the line-item) a noun or a verb? I would argue is it syntactically a noun but semantically a verb.
Hmm. I’m quite certain it’s pure noun. If it were a verb, then it would only have a single-purpose – to order something – and wouldn’t be able to be archived, printed, translated, etc… which it clearly can. Obviously a message can only have one authoritative application-level verb, and if you’re using HTTP, then the request method is it.
The business meaning of a purchase order is an “offer to buy”.
The seller may accept it or not.
The business meaning of a purchase order line item that is accepted by the seller is a promise by the seller to deliver the requested goods or services, and a promise by the buyer to pay for them.
So they are both nouns (offer and promise), even when they are part of ordering something.
Each may trigger actions. The PO (as offer to buy) triggers a business-level offer-acceptance protocol. The accepted PO line item triggers the delivery of the goods or services, and (depending on the terms), the delivery of the goods or services may trigger the payment.
But I don’t think the triggering of actions makes the nouns into verbs.
> So they are both nouns (offer and promise)
Ok, that was ambiguous, since both offer and promise can be either noun or verb. I meant the noun form: an offer, a promise. I think that is the correct grammatical type for offer and promise documents.
Yup, agreed Bob.
More on Verbs vs Nouns…
Not my two-cents, actually, in response to Pat Hellands Every Noun can be Verbed
[Objects|Closures] are just a poor man’s [closures|objects] via via
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