Summary of WSA January F2F meeting

For those who could not attend, or those trying to make sense of it all, 
here's an attempt to summarize the recent WSA WG F2F meeting.  Many thanks 
to the host, Cyclone Commerce, for their hospitality!

IRC logs are at:

http://www.w3.org/2003/01/22-ws-desc-irc
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/22-ws-arch-irc
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/23-ws-arch-irc
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/24-ws-arch-irc

** Participants are asked to suggest additions or corrections if their 
recollections and notes are better than mine.  Also, if if anyone scribed 
into an offline file rather than IRC, please send it to the Administrative 
list ASAP. ***


Wednesday:

 Discussion of Reliability and the WS-Reliability spec and activity
 (No action items?)

 JOINT MEETING WITH WSD WG
  Usage Scenarios
  - Will reappoint Usege Scenarios TF members to revitalize this
    deliverable.
  Internationalization of web services (Martin Duerst)
  - Please review
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-i18n-scenarios-20021220.
  WS Security WSDL Extensions:
  - Jonathan Will work with CG to say that Wsdesc wg would be interested to 
get feedback on WSDL 1.2 from people that write wsdl extensions.
  Schedule confirmed:
  - Rennes: May 12-16 (Desc goes first)
  - Toronto: July 28-August 1 (Arch goes first)
  - Consider West Coast in Sept, Sydney in Nov to combine with AC meeting 
in Japan.

  Summary of Dave Orchard's comments on the WSD Requirements doc
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-desc- 
comments/2003Jan/0000.html


  BREAKOUT SESSIONS

  WSA and the Webarch / REST - Dave Orchard is updating a message from long 
ago outlining three different approaches to the same application 
requirement, stressing the  strengths/weaknesses of each.
    Objective is to make sure that it accurately reflects a REST
    and non-REST approach from the point of view of the advocates.

  Refactoring the WSA document
  - Eric Newcomer will sketch out a more minimal / formal structure for the
    document to make it more of an "architecture" and less of a brain dump.
    Existing material will be re-used or moved to a Roadmap / Primer as 
appropriate

  Incorporating asynch and pub-sub MEPs into the WSA
   See Mark Jone's document at
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ws-arch/2003Jan/0044.html
   [any action items?]

  Updating the Glossary document
  See the IRC log at http://www.w3.org/2003/01/22-wsaf2f-gloss-irc

  TROUT POND - Open-ended discussion [ no minutes taken]

Thursday:

  DOCUMENT REFACTORING DISCUSSION SUMMARY

  There was a rough consensus that the current WSA document is too focused 
on narrative description and needs to refactored to formally define the
  properties and relationships that comprise the Web services architecture.
  [Incorporating some discussion from Friday morning] The proposed outline 
is:

  Ch. 0 Preface (including the rationale, history, etc.)

  Ch. 1 Contract with the reader (definition of audience, what they can 
expect)

  Ch 2. Concepts and Relationships (definition of key terms and how they
  relate to one another)

  Ch. 3. Architectural qualities ("ilities" such as reliability,  
scalability, etc. implied by multiple concepts and relationships)

  Ch. 4 Constraints


  RELIABILITY / RELIABLE MESSAGING BREAKOUT SESSIONS

  There was a general discussion of "reliability".  Mike C. summarized
  the mailing list activity as follows:  Three different aspects have been
  discussed and intermingled: 1) mechanical means to make sure that a 
message arrives once and only once. 2) rest model of designing your 
messaging such that you can always retry. 3) Choreography (broadly defined) 
in which messaging failure is one of the many things that can go wrong in a 
business transation and some sort of compensation or rollback is necessary.

  A number of people (especially Hao He) stressed that reliable messaging 
is only part of the problem in making sure that a produce and consumer get 
the job done, the overall interaction between the producer and consumer 
also may need to be reliability. This gets into some of the management 
issues related to reliability.

  We split into two groups, one to investigate reliability "top down" from
  general principles, and one to investigate reliable messaging from the
  "bottom up."

   - Action items to the two groups to produce concise summaries of their 
discussions and implications for the WSA spec.

  RETHINKING DISCOVERY - DAVID BOOTH

  David Booth led a discussion of 
http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/arch/2/10/roles_clean.htm
  This was very well received by the WG.  We believe that this could be the 
basis for a Primer or Roadmap document that would present the WSA at a high 
level.  The important new concepts seemed to
  be a) Humans must be explicitly modeled in the WSA; they are somehow 
involved in discovering services,
  writing software, and coming to out-of-band agreements on what's going 
on; b) It's important to incorporate both the machine-processable 
descriptions of the mechanics of a web service and the
  human processable semantics of a web service to model discovery.

  - Action item: David will expand the document to add a "Scenario 0" which 
is the Web as we know it as well as a Scenario n+1 which will describe [?].

  - Action item: the editors will harvest David's document for concepts, 
relationships, and diagrams as appropriate.

   - Action item: David and Hugo will work to reconcile the terminology in 
this document and the Glossary.


Friday:

  REVIEW OF ISSUES LIST

  A "triage" on the issues list was performed to see if there were issues 
we could dispose of, either by not accepting them or resolving them 
quickly.  A few were resolved.  Many action items were handed out to 
individuals who would "champion" the resolution of specific items.

  MANAGEMENT TASK FORCE REPORT
  See 
http://www.w3.org/2003/ws/arch/3/01/heather/Management_f2f_012102_clean.htm
  Long discussion of process and coordination issues.
  Action item: The MTF will make concrete recommendations by the next F2F.

  DOCUMENT REFACTORING DISCUSSION

  See the summary above; this discussion clarified the outline.  The 
editors and various ad hoc groups
  are working to produce a "proof of concept" of the new structure to see 
if it works.





-- 
Mike Champion

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 21:14:34 UTC