Assessment of WSRF - ResourceProperties

[Keith Swenson <KSwenson@us.fujitsu.com>]

I finally have gotten the time to review this spec, and to assess how this relates to ASAP.  Generally the specification is a good one and offers something of value to the community.  It overlaps almost completely with ASAP, and it goes to a greater depth of specifity about a small part of ASAP.  My summary is below.

• There is one overwhelming problem: it references WS-Addressing which is not a ratified standard, and has not even been offered to a standards body.  We have no guarantee that WS-Addressing will be offered royalty free, nor do we have any guarantee that it will not change from its current form.  We can not accept this.  Luckily, this just introduces three or so header fields which are pretty much orthogonal to main purpose of the specification -- we should be able to use the rest without complication.
• ASAP Factory and Instances are clearly resources.  The properties on these resources could be represented in a manner consistent with that which WS-RP expects.  Recommendation: see if we can allign on the things of value.
• ASAP has the concept of "context data" but does not define what that is.  WS-RP specifies that the data of the resource MUST be a collection of properties, each property defined as a top level schema declaration within the resource properties container.  This is a slight restriction over ASAP, but many implementations are expected to have a structure which is a number of properties.  Earlier specifications which ASAP is based upon have explicitely included the notion of properties so it is not a foreign concept.  The WS-RP spec makes it clear that this is a "view" of the resource, and not necessarily the resource itself, which is a nice way of saying that there may still be hidden values.   Recommendation: adopt this same restriction into ASAP in the same way.
• GetResourceProperty takes the name of the property you want to retrieve.  Being able to get a single property is a very powerful advance over what ASAP has offered to date.  GetResourceProperties takes a number of names, and all the specified properties are returned. Recommendation: include a functions to do exactly this.
• Properties are allowed to have multiple values, so you have insert, delete, and update operations instead of the simple set operation.  This is good for generality.  include a functions to do exactly this.

We should discuss these in terms of changes to make AFTER June demonstration.

 

-Keith

Keith D Swenson, kswenson@us.fujitsu.com
Fujitsu Software Corporation
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