DOM IDL Questions

Hi everyone:

OSM is a member of the Object Management Group.  We are currently preparing
our final submission against the Electronic Commerce Domain Task Force RFP
for a Negotiation Facility.  Our submission provides a set of object that
support the structuring of bilateral and multilateral collaborative process
for the purpose of reaching contractually binding agreement.

Our current specification enables the selection of two possible platforms
for negotiable subject manipulation.  These include:

	1. the W3C DOM Level 1 Node interface
	2. OMG's CosProperty Service PropertySetDef interface

In preparing the Negotiation Facility spec we have encountered some issues
concerning the DOM IDL.  We would very much like to initiate mechanisms to
ensure we have a clean link between our submission at the OMG level and the
W3C's DOM interface IDL spec as we believe there is tremendous synergy
between current OMG efforts and the W3C DOM interfaces.

Here is a summary of the issues:

	1. The DOM IDL spec does not define a pragma prefix
	   (OMG specs are required to contain a pragma prefix, such as
	   omg.org - which when mapped to Java comes out as org.omg) -
	   We are currently assuming a pragma prefix of w3c.org which
	   would match the prefix declared in the Java language binding.
	   The issue is probably limited to a question of permission from
	   W3C concerning the usage of the w3c.org pragma prefix.  Can
	   anyone suggest the appropriate W3C approach to deal with this ?

	2. The DOM spec declares a separate language mapping for Java.  It
	   is not clear if this is based on the OMG Java Language Mapping or
	   not. Clarification on this point would be helpful.

	3. Partly related to point 2, the IDL specifices a module name of
	   org_w3c_dom, however, the Java language mapping specifies dom as
	   the module name.  If the Java language mapping was based on the
	   OMG mapping spec, the IDL module name should be the same - i.e.
	   dom instead of org_w3c_dom.

Looking forward to any clarification or suggestions on these points.

Cheers, Steve.

Stephen J. McConnell, OSM sarl
Business Components for Electronic Commerce
http://www.osm.net
mailto:mcconnell@osm.net

Received on Monday, 16 November 1998 12:28:05 UTC