[alf-dev] 09/12/2005 - Architecture Meeting Minutes

["Tim Buss" <tbuss@xxxxxxxxxx>]

ALF Architecture Committee Meeting Minutes
9/12/2005

Action Items from the previous Architecture meeting (9/01/2005) were
discussed as follows

Item 1: 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.

The ALF conformance presentation identified a number of items for
further investigation.  These were discussed.

1. WSDL Documentation Tag - Internationalization issues

There was general agreement that this was not a pressing issue and can be
deferred for now.

2. SOAP Faults - ALF specific faults, toolkit behavior.

There was general agreement that while this was not a pressing issue
immediately it would be useful to investigate the possibility of ALF,
eclipse and XML Namespaces. The eclipse EMF project was cited as a place to
look for precedent.

Brian Carroll volunteered to follow up

3. Datatypes - will the need for late bound data be common in ALF services.

This issue was discussed.  There seemed to be general agreement that late
bound data is not that common a requirement.  It was noted that Serena has
this issue to some extent and will need to address it.

4. WS Security  -  Open Source Web service toolkit support is lacking or
immature.  When will we be able to use it?

This discussion broadened to a more general security discussion that is
ongoing in the requirements committee.  Broadly there are two questions:
"What to do for the POC?" and "What to in the longer term?" The main issue
is that while there are proposed standards for various parts of the security
puzzle there are no universal solutions.  As far as WS-Security is concerned
it seems clear that we need a practical investigation as to what works.  A
solution for the POC needs a separate discussion.

No specific action item was identified.  Tim Buss will start to look into
WS-Security as part of the Web Service example.

5. WS-Notification - is it the right thing

A requirement for a synchronous Service Flow in addition to the ability to
have multiple Service Flows fired by an event.  A proposal was made to allow
a single synchronous service flow in conjunction with multiple asynchronous
service flows.  The issue was raise that this would require ALF to specify
the Event protocol and the management scheme since we could no longer
leverage WS-Notification subscription as a way to configure events. There
were no objections to the proposal.  A clarification was made indicating
that synchronous meant that the caller would get a return value from the
service flow. It was agreed that this would be easier to discuss if the
proposal was made concrete.

Tim Buss and Brian Carroll volunteered to prepare such a proposal.

6. Service Examples - we need some

While there had been an intent to discuss an example WSDL, in the interests
of time and to avoid the soporific effects that pure XML might have this was
deferred to a posting.  A proposal was made that once the example was
created, it should be useful to implement it using all the various Web
service tools that interested ALF participants are using. Five toolkits were
identified: Microsoft .NET+WSE, Apache Axis, Apache Axis2, gSoap, and
IdooXoap.

Tim Buss will post an example service for discussion.

7. Alf Conformance Review and Test - What to do here?

This issue was not discussed directly.  A point to note is that WS-I
provides conformance tools for the WS-I Basic.  These may be downloaded from
the WS-I site.
http://www.ws-i.org/deliverables/workinggroup.aspx?wg=testingtools

Item 2:  Serena will commit to preparing a Service example for discussion at
the next Architecture committee meeting.

This was discussed above

Item 3: The architecture committee members and other interested parties will
further examine WS-Notification in order to bring resolution to this point

This was discussed above

Item 4: Find out what the intended use of the Eclipse infrastructure is and
when we might expect the Wikki facility to be available.

This was not discussed.  However, it is known that eclipse is working on
getting a Wikki.
For the current infrastructure, in general, the Newsgroup should be used for
all public discussion items since it allows discussions to be threaded.  The
Alf Newsgroup forwards to the alf-dev mailing list automatically.  You
cannot easily distinguish between mailing list and newsgroup messages but it
is better to reply to the newsgroup rather than the mailing list.  The
mailing lists are more for announcements and general information
distribution.  While posts to the mailing lists are archived they are not
threaded and it is only possible to reply to mail you receive.

The next meeting is planned to be on Thursday, 15th September 2005 and
11:00am PST.  It was generally agreed that a regular time was easier to
manage.

Tim Buss
Serena Inc
September 12, 2005