Re: The requirements on message 'correllation'

Fletcher, Tony wrote:
> But picking up an argument that I think it was Frank made, it may often be the case that the systems are not programmatically aware that they are following a choreography instance.  Suppose that a description of choreography is agreed amongst some cooperating parties using our CDL.  Each party then implements using BPEL as an intermediate step (or directly using a programming language).  When this choreography is followed the systems are in fact following an unfolding instance of the choreography, but they are also following an unfolding instance of interacting BPEL instances (or programme instances) and it is these that the messages will need to directly identify and target.

A point briefly made in the conf call was that what we are building (the 
CDL) possibly isn't really describing the implementation layer through 
which messages are actually interchanged. If it's at a sufficiently 
abstract level, then it doesn't matter how correlation is accomplished.

Now, I understand that it is also envisioned to have a binding 
technology through which the choreography can be associated with 
specific message formats. But again, the question is, do you need to 
specify how correlation is accomplished at the CDL level. Or is the 
binding still abstract in this sense?

If the participants are using BPEL as their implementation, then they 
have a correlation mechanism available
(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-bpel/#messagecorrelation).

If they're using something else, then they likely need a corresponding 
standard.

However, the issue then is, do we need to specify what that is? Or in 
fact, as Yaron was saying, do we actively not want to specify the 
correlation mechanism, to avoid precluding use of existing/emerging 
standards?

I understand the concern about interop but if we are not going to the 
level of laying out the full semantics of the implemenation (as BPEL 
does) then interop isn't really an issue, it seems to me.

Btw. I am not sure punting this issue to WSA is going to really help. 
The WSA doc says right at the start that "The architecture does not 
attempt to specify how Web services are implemented, and imposes no 
restriction on how services might be combined". Which is not to say they 
can't discuss the issue, but specifying an implementation is not in 
scope for them (IMO).

--Jon

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2003 13:42:27 UTC