[alf-dev] 9/01/2005 - ALF Archictecture Meeting Minutes

["Tim Buss" <tbuss@xxxxxxxxxx>]

ALF Architecture Committee Meeting Minutes
9/01/2005

At this meeting we discussed ALF Conformance Guidelines

Presentation:
Serena gave a presentation outlining the general meaning of ALF
Conformance and identifying various areas that need further
investigation.  A copy of this presentation can currently be found as a
.pdf link on the ALF homepage (www.eclipse.org/alf) in the News section
announcement of this meeting.

Discussions:

TBDs identified by the Presentation
The ALF conformance presentation identified a number of items for
further investigation as follows:
WSDL Documentation Tag - Internationalization issues
SOAP Faults - ALF specific faults, toolkit behavior.
Datatypes - will the need for late bound data be common in ALF services.
Service Examples - we need some (see POC and Service Examples discussion
below)
WS-Notification - is it the right thing ( see WS-Notification discussion
below )
WS Security  -  Open Source Web service toolkit support is lacking or
immature.  When will we be able to use it?
Alf Conformance Review and Test - What to do here? (see POC and Service
Examples discussion below)

Action Items:
The architecture committee members and other interested parties will
examine these items and provide some feedback to  identify errors and
omissions,  propose and/or expand the guidelines,  and generally fill in
the blanks.  The goal is to produce a more complete and formalized
document describing ALF conformance by the end of September 2005.

POC and Service Examples, Service Reviews and Conformance Testing
We need to get some good web service examples soon.  The hope is that
the POC will provide some example and that these may be used to
illustrate ALF conformance.

A process of Service Review was discussed.  It was suggested that while
this was very appropriate for the POC it would not be advisable to
extend it generally to ALF participants.  Beyond the POC we should limit
ourselves to providing examples.

The idea of an ALF Conformance test was mentioned but it is not yet
clear what this would entail.

Action Items:
Serena will commit to preparing a Service example for discussion at the
next Architecture committee meeting.

WS-Notification
WS-Notification was discussed concerning the relative merits of
Using a "standards" based mechanism
Vs
The additional implementation burden this may place on ALF participants

The main points of this discussion are:
1.	WS-Notification is more than we require.  Typically ALF will be
the only subscriber to a tool's events and we do not need complex
"Topic" matching
2.	WS-Notification does allow ALF to be configured centrally to
subscribe to Tools events rather than having to configure each event
source to locate ALF.
3.	The alternative is to specify and ALF Event Web service and
require that ALF participants provide some way that they can be
configured connect their events to ALF
4.	Standards are a good thing and there is benefit and attraction
that, in general encourages participation
5.	The burden of implementation may be mitigated if open source
implementations are available.
6.	This can depend on who is promoting the standard but this does
not seem to be a issue for WS-Notification
7.	Currently, the Open Source support seems to be limited to
Pubscribe which recently released a 1.0 Java based version of the Base
Notification spec.

The general consensus seemed to be that WS-Notification seems to be a
viable option but no strong opinion for or against was expressed

Action Items:
The architecture committee members and other interested parties will
further examine WS-Notification in order to bring resolution to this
point

Communication Infrastructure Issues
There was some discussion as to the correct use of Eclipse
Infrastructure.  For the Service Review an initial process of posting
the Service Description to the ALF Newsgroup was suggested.  No
objections were raised.

It was suggested that a Wiki would be a good tool for the task at hand.
We understand that Eclipse is in the process of creating that facility.

The eclipse instructions indicate that the Mailing list are intended for
direct communication to the developers whereas Newsgroups are for public
discussion.  Since the mailing list mail is publicly archived and there
does not seem to be a way to control who is on the mailing list, this
seems a rather artificial distinction.

Action Item:
Find out what the intended use of the Eclipse infrastructure is and when
we might expect the Wiki facility to be available.
Next Meeting
The next Architecture meeting will be from 11:00 - 12:00 Pacific on
Thursday, 8 September.  Serena will send the meeting announcement and
agenda to alf-events and alf-dev mailing lists.

Tim Buss
Serena Inc
September 1, 2005