RE: Mapping Specs to the Architecture

 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Orchard [mailto:dorchard@bea.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 1:50 PM
To: 'Ugo Corda'; 'Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)'; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Mapping Specs to the Architecture


I think a very relevent question to ask wrt mapping specs to architectureis:
are we documenting functional areas, specifications that fit these areas, or
both?  For example: imagine we want to talk about transaction context
propagation.  Shall we talk only about ws-transaction and ws-coordination,
or shall we also talk about btp?  For choreography, shall we talk about
bpel4ws, wsci, wscl, bpss, bpml, bpmi, various research projects? 
 

All I had in mind was a cell in the table (or whatever) labelled
"Choreography", and references to all the specs that we know of that would
be fully or partially contained in that cell.   

 
If standards process to date can be my guide, we will end having an
inclusive, rather than exclusive list.   The "stds" body won't want to make
the hard choice of picking winning specifications.   

Yeah .... 

 
 Which means, to be blunt, my company isn't too terribly interested.  We
have made our bets on which things will "win".  
 

Of  course, that's what you should be doing.  But by labeling BPEL, WSCI,
BPSS, etc. etc. etc. as falling roughly into the "Choreography" slot in the
architecture, we're not saying anything about which ones we're betting on as
a WG, are we?  I would say that   the whole point of what we're doing is to
move the world a notch closer to a situation where you could bet on BPEL, I
could bet on WSCI (or whatever Martin's crew come up with!), but we could
still interoperate with respect to the standards (perhaps some RM spec) that
we do agree on.  That's NOT what happened in the COM and CORBA worlds; you
picked one spec, you got the whole stack with it.

 
 Why would we want to be part of an effort that legitimizes things that we
don't believe in?   
 

I understand this concern, especially the notion that the number of
permutations of all these things is astronomical.  So what could we (the W3C
WS Arch WG) do to make the world a saner place than it would be without us?
I'm not asking this rhetorically, I just dont' know what we could do to get
everyone to bet on the same technologies.  I guess I see the point of the
WSA is to "legitimize" (for example) a conception of where to draw the line
between "description" and "choreography", not to "legitimize" a particular
flavor of choreography amongst all the other flavors.  Am I missing
something?  I would be very happy if we could do more than this to help
people make sense of the world, but I'm not sure it would be possible.  But
I'm willing to be convinced!