Review of WSDL core for WSA

I've gone through the WSDL core LC2 draft from top to bottom a few times
now, and also had a fresh look at our WSDL binding.  While I do have
several comments and questions about the core on my own behalf, which
I'll be writing up as time permits, I don't believe there's too much to
say from a WSA perspective.

As far as I can tell, WSA and WSDL intersect mainly in the area of
MEPs.  EPRs can carry WSDL descriptions as metadata, but they can carry
anything at all as metadata, so it's hard to see what restrictions this
would entail.  MEPs, on the other hand, are dealt with mainly as
adjuncts, not in the core.  As long as the WSDL can support MEPs beyond
the core set, and I believe it does so by design, we should be OK there.

Long story short, only two areas stood out on first reading:

    * Section 3.3 has the intriguing title "Describing Messages that
      Refer to Services and Endpoints." which seems at least
      statistically similar to the EPR section of the WSA core, and it
      even talks about the {address} property of endpoints.  However, on
      closer inspection this is just about tagging schema components and
      the like with the names of interfaces and bindings that reference
      them.  I don't believe this affects us, and I don't recall it
      coming up in our discussions.
    * Section 6.1.1, "Mandatory extensions" is about the wsdl:required
      attribute.  This, of course, has been the subject of quite a bit
      of discussion concerning how to use this attribute in conjunction
      with wsa:UsingAddressing.  Reading through this gave me a bit more
      insight into that discussion, but as far as comments to WSDL, I
      don't really see any.  From our point of view, wsdl:required is a
      "fact on the ground," and unless we feel that wsa:UsingAddressing
      can't be made to work without changes to it, I don't think we have
      anything  to add.  I believe our woes have been more along the
      lines of trying to understand which of several possible readings
      of wsdl:required to standardize on, and that's our problem, not
      WSDL's.  WSDL isn't preventing us from defining the semantics we need.

With this in mind, I believe I have discharged my action item for WSDL
review to the best of my ability.  If anyone else has any major
concerns, please speak up.

Received on Sunday, 11 September 2005 05:07:50 UTC