Re: Proposed text on reliability in the web services architecture

Arkin,

> There's a whole class of distributed algorithms that attempt to address
> reliability by defining the system as a composition of automata that is
> based on exactly two operations: read and write. State transitions are
> client derived. The client uses a read operation to determine the current
> state, and a write operation to change it to a new state, with guarantee
> that the same write given the same initial state would always result in
the
> same terminal state (in other words, all actions are idempotent).

That may be a deterministic finite state machine, but it's not what
idempotent means.  You should check your definition.  For this discussion,
it obviously matter... a lot.

Walden