Moving forward on addressing and referencing in the W3C

An open letter to the W3C AC Forum from the AC reps:

Steve Caughey, Arjuna Technologies Ltd. (steve.caughey@arjuna.com)
Dale Moberg, CycloneCommerce, Inc. (dmoberg@cyclonecommerce.com)
Duncan Johnston-Watt Enigmatec Corporation, Ltd. (duncan@enigmatec.net)
Masahiko Narita, Fujitsu Limited (masahiko.narita@jp.fujitsu.com)
Tadashi Yamagishi, Hitachi, Ltd.  (yamagi_t@itg.hitachi.co.jp)
Eric Newcomer, Iona Technologies, Inc. eric.newcomer@iona.com)
Fumio Onimaru, NEC Corporation  (f-onimaru@bu.jp.nec.com)
Art Barstow, Nokia Corporation (art.barstow@nokia.com)
Jeff Mischkinsky, Oracle Corporation (jeff.mischkinsky@oracle.com)
Ugo Corda, SeeBeyond Technology Corporation (ucorda@seebeyond.com)
Eduardo Gutentag, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (eduardo.gutentag@sun.com)


There has been lots of informal discussion of how to bring about industry 
convergence in the area of Web Service Referencing and Addressing. We all 
know that there are two major specifications "out there": 
WS-MessageDelivery [2], published by the W3C as a Member Submission, and 
two public versions of WS-Addressing.  WS-MessageDelivery can be found at 
[2] and the latest version of WS-Addressing can be found at [3].

We believe the time as come to have an open and honest debate within the 
Advisory Committee to see if there is a way to charter a Working Group 
which would have the participation of the entire web service community. The 
benefits to the Web services user community of a successful outcome which 
results in a widely adopted open standard are obvious. What is not obvious 
is how to get there from here.

We float the following (WS-)strawman in the spirit of cooperation. We view 
it as a means to "test the waters" to see if there is the reasonable 
possibility of convergence within the Advisory Committee as to desirability 
of starting this work within the W3C community -- now, and under these or 
similar conditions.

Our purpose is to kick off a discussion within the Advisory Committee with 
the aim of expeditiously starting a WG. We believe that the requirements 
are clear and that substantial contributions exist. With industry 
recognition of these elements, and contribution of their use, it is 
apparent that reasonable convergence should be feasible now. Given the 
background and history, we believe that two weeks should be sufficient to 
determine if this will happen, e.g. a draft charter which has consensus 
support.

This proposal focuses on the essential points of such a charter. It does 
not have all the common W3C charter boilerplate and language about 
schedules, etc. We believe that if there is general agreement about these 
essential points, the rest of the Charter will fall into place.

We describe and suggest words for the Purpose, Scope and Goals, Input, 
Deliverables and Related Activities of such a Working Group.

For the purposes of this discussion we chose a neutral name for the working 
group, the Web Services Addressing and Referencing Framework WG. (WS-ARF)

We welcome debate and comments, either publicly or privately.


Possible DRAFT CHARTER, 20040601

=======
Web Services Addressing and Referencing Framework WG

Statement of Purpose:

The purpose of this WG is to define extensible and reusable mechanisms
to reference Web Services, to allow such Web service references to be 
passed in messages, and to support WSDL Messsage Exchange Patterns.

The specification must support the MEPs in WSDL 1.1, the MEPs anticipated 
in WSDL 2.0 if it is sufficiently progressed, and may define support for 
other useful MEPS such as basic callback [1].

Scope:

The ability to identify participants in a Web service message exchange is 
fundamental to the dynamic and ever changing world of on-line business. 
WSDL provides mechanisms to define and describe the server side of an 
interaction (i.e. where to send a one way or a request messages to), but 
there are no
standardized mechanisms to identify other delivery destinations that may 
exist in a message exchange pattern, such as a reply-to destination.

The following points constitute the requirements and scope for the output 
of this WG:

1. A way to reference Web services (stateful or stateless), and other 
delivery destinations that participate in an MEP, in a way that enables 
those references to be passed around.

2. Definition of abstract properties to identify recipients, senders, 
messages, reply-to, fault destinations, message correlation(s) between 
messages etc, in order to support MEPs as defined in WSDL 1.1 and 
anticipated for WSDL 2.0.

3. Definition of bindings for SOAP 1.1 and 1.2, by mapping the abstract 
properties to SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 header blocks, including the normative 
use of the SOAP header blocks for each MEP

4. Definition of callback pattern(s) and header blocks used to support 
point-to-point asynchronous communication. Other MEPs may also be considered

5. Given a Web service reference, define normative mechanisms to obtain the 
service's WSDL description, referenced documents and related metadata. For 
example, WSDL 2.0 contains a wsdli:wsdlLocation attribute although its 
usage is undefined. Rules for its use and a similar mechanism for WSDL 1.1 
could be defined.

6. Discussion of non-normative scenarios and use cases describing possible 
ways to compose and use the specifications to be defined by the WG with 
other ongoing work, e.g. WS-RF, WS-Context, WSDM, etc.


Deliverables
============

  - A WS-Addressing and Referencing Framework Recommendation
  - A primer introducing the above specification, including use cases and 
scenarios as appropriate as described in 6. above.

Inputs
======

[ We realize that this is one major contentious issues and in the spirit of 
compromise propose the following. ]

The primary input to this WG will be the WS-Addressing [3] Member 
Submission published on <fill in date once it has been submitted>. Other 
contributions, including the W3C Member Submission WS-MessageDelivery [2] 
published on 26th April 2004, shall also be accepted, provided they conform 
to the goals and scope of this Charter.

The WG shall use these inputs without prejudice or restriction and evaluate 
them on their technical merit,in its deliberations to create deliverables 
which satisfy the Charter requirements.

Related Activities
==================

The WG will collaborate with W3C efforts within the Web Service Activity 
including WSD, XMLP, WS-Chor as appropriate.
The WG will collaborate with relevant OASIS TCs such as WS-RF, WS-N, 
WS-CAF, WS-BPEL, ASAP as appropriate

REFERENCES:
1] WS-I Usage Scenarios, Version 1.01, December  2003.
            http://www.ws-i.org/SampleApplications/SupplyChainManagement/2003-12/UsageScenarios-1.01.pdf

[2] WS-MessageDelivery, Version 1.0, 26 April 2004.
       http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-ws-messagedelivery-20040426/

[3] WS-Addressing, March 30, 2004
       http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-add/
Jeff Mischkinsky                      jeff.mischkinsky@oracle.com
Consulting Member Technical Staff     +1(650)506-1975
Director, Web Services Standards      500 Oracle Parkway M/S 4OP9
Oracle Corporation                    Redwood Shores, CA 94065

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2004 13:36:55 UTC