Summary
Interfaces, contracts, methods, operations, entities, objects, and tables, oh my! The OSID Specification defines its own language solely in reference to itself. Developers will look at it from the OSID Language Binding perspective. Others will import concepts from what they have worked with in databases, web services, or MVC-based platforms. The result is a mash of terms that matters once in a while.
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OSIDs are consumed by OSID Consumers in software. They OSIDs are Application Programming Interfaces.
However, OSIDs are designed around integration points and abstracted to promote interoperability in software by moving configuration and control from consumers to providers. Many APIs are to utility libraries that allow their applications to more easily command what the library will do, such as storing data in a HashSet, building a DOM tree, when to send data over the wire. So, not all APIs make good service contracts (in fact few are designed with this intent).
Attributes & Data Fields
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The term contract is often used in service designs to distinguish an interface from a message structure or DTO. The message structure and DTO are considered data while the contract defines the operations on that data. OSIDs define the agreement between service consumers and service providers. In the OSID world, most everything in the specification can be considered a contract, i.e. "The AgentList is a contract."
DTO (DAO, Bean, Domain Object)
A Data Transfer Object is used to transfer bags of data values. However, OSIDs are interfaces into OSID Providers. OSID Providers may be dynamic and DTOs are static.
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The term "service" doesn't have any formal definition in the OSID Specification. It's tossed around because this is a Service Design Methodology.
Standard
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