Renaming Reusable Connections to Common Definitions

[egekorkan]

In the TD call today, we have decided to rename the Reusable Connections feature to Common Definitions. This will remove confusion about reusing the "socket" connection like a pool of connections. That topic is going to be named separately and elaborated in the bindings section as it is protocol-specific. Guidelines should be provided for implementations to reuse the connection to the Thing when it makes sense (for the protocol and for the use case).

[benfrancis]

The name "common definitions" makes sense since this feature seems to have become more about re-useable Forms etc. rather than just about re-using an open connection, which is where it started.

However, what exactly will be the mechanism for telling a Consumer that it should re-use a connection rather than create a new one for each interaction affordance?

In the Web Thing Protocol we currently assert this in the sub-protocol specification, but I was expecting there to eventually be some way to express it in a Thing Description.

Are you saying this will need to be a protocol binding specific term, and therefore we will need a WebSocket binding document in order to express this for WebSocket connections? Or there be a generic term in the Bindings section of the Thing Description specification? Or in the case of WebSockets is it sufficient to simply assert this in the sub-protocol specification as we are already doing?

[egekorkan]

Are you saying this will need to be a protocol binding specific term, and therefore we will need a WebSocket binding document in order to express this for WebSocket connections?

Most probably this. It can also be an implementation guidance expressed in the specific binding spec.