Occam's Razor

[Alastair Green <alastair.green@choreology.com>]

Dear colleagues,

There is doubtless a spectrum of opinion in the BTP TC over the shape of
the specification, given the phone call yesterday.

To us it seems unhelpful, at this late stage, to seek to revise the
overall shape and scope decided upon in the San Jose meeting, and (at
BEA's instigation) expanded to include VCT-composer relations, also
officially decided at a teleconference in August.

Nevertheless there appears to be a wide sentiment for such a revision.

The last thing any of us need is a sprawling, eight-way debate on what
stays in and what stays out. The maximum edition (which gives a
coherent, overall picture) would have been useful, and so will a minimum
edition (which gives a stripped down but technically accurate atomic
two-phase coordination protocol).

Our chief concern is to get a committee specification adopted soon that
can be got out into the market.

We are therefore preparing a new submission to the TC. This will consist
of a draft specification 1.0 which will contain the bare minimum
required for a technically correct specification of interoperation
between Superiors and Inferiors, and will entirely omit any informal
explanatory material and any attempt to set this core relationship in
the context of cohesions, transaction trees, etc.

This submission will be available at some point prior to next week's
phone call.

At that point we will leave it in the hands of the TC as to how to
proceed. Of course Peter is prepared to remain as co-chair of the
specification committee to help administer the process of bringing the
spec out. Our writing capacity will have to be limited to revising or
perfecting those parts of the minimal spec that we consider core and
vital, including ensuring that the XML encoding/SOAP binding is adequate
for a realistic Web Services environment.

Other companies might perhaps consider producing some kind of white
paper to explain the context and purpose of BTP, which the TC could
endorse.

Yours,

Alastair

PS. ACRID should stand for Atomicity, Consistency, Reduced
Isolation/Durability. It's a neat acronym.
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