Re: [sca-assembly] [ASSEMBLY-227]: (1.2) Promotion of consumers andproducers undermines composability

[Mike Edwards <mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com>]

Folks,

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I agree with
Peter's summary and comments below.

A couple of things to add:

a) It is possible with references and
with services to build composites that have hard wired addresses nested
into lower level composites
and which cannot be overridden when
the composite is used to implement a component in a higher level composite.
 This is a close parallel
of the use of Domain-level channels
in the Event Processing model.

b) JMS Topics are indeed very close
to Domain level channels, but please remember that there are potentially
many other bindings than
JMS that might be used to implement
SCA Event Processing channels.  The fact that SCA Channels can be
mapped to JMS Topics is 
goodness, but the fact that they are
more abstract also means that they can be mapped to other types of binding.


Yours,  Mike.

Strategist - Emerging Technologies, SCA & SDO.
Co Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC.
IBM Hursley Park, Mail Point 146, Winchester, SO21 2JN, Great Britain.
Phone & FAX: +44-1962-818014    Mobile: +44-7802-467431  
Email:  mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com

From:	Peter Niblett/UK/IBM@IBMGB
To:	Eric Johnson <eric@tibco.com>
Cc:	OASIS Assembly <sca-assembly@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date:	11/05/2010 12:24
Subject:	Re: [sca-assembly] Fw: [sca-assembly-comment] NEW ISSUE: (1.2) Promotion of consumers and producers undermines composability

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Eric 

I have read your correspondence with Dave Booz, and taken a quick look
at your revisions. I have a number of things to ask about that, but first
I would like to understand the issues here. 

I think your points relative to the Feb 12 draft can be summarized as 

1. Components within a composite can be directly wired to a domain-level
channel (see the example in figure 2-6). As Dave points out, this can be
viewed as breaking encapsulation as there is nothing explicit in the component
types of components D1 and D2 that tells you that this is going on (since
you can't reconfigure it when assembling the composite). You have to look
inside the definitions of composites X and Y to see this, and if there
is a deep nesting of composites you have to look down all the levels.  

2. The mechanism of linking up producing and consuming components within
a composite, e.g. in the case shown in figure 2-5, is awkward. You have
to configure the @sources of the consumers and the @targets of the producers
to point to the same channel 

3. At the moment channels are either completely private (scoped only within
a single composite), or completely global (when they are in the domain).
There is no mechanism for promoting a channel so that it is visible only
to a given composite and its subcomponents. 

4. Domain level channels don't seem to be necessary since we could do the
same thing by binding to JMS topics. 

Please correct me if this is wrong. 

In "defence" of the OSOA spec, what we were trying to do is 

a) Allow true decoupling of event-centric components, so that it is possible
to author a component as a pure consumer and/or producer of events without
knowing how these components are going to be assembled. This means keeping
details of the channels out of the component types. This is the main motivation
for having <producer> and <consumer> elements in the component
type and for declaring filters as part of the consumer (if there's no way
a component can handle a particular kind of event, it should say so)

b) Allow an assembler - if he/she wishes - to define a tight coupling of
components so that they can be wired up without "leakage" of
events outside a composite, and without external events coming into the
composite uninvited. This is needed when you are modelling event processing
applications. This is why we have private channels scoped within components,
as shown in figures 2-4, 2-5 and 2-7. 

c) Allow loose binding of components, where producers are not aware of
the identities of the consumers and vice versa, and where there is some
kind of global event distribution mechanism (an event bus if you will)
that spans all application components. This is done by having global channels
at the domain level 

d) Provide an abstraction that allows event distribution to be modelled
in a protocol neutral fashion. This is the reason for having channels in
the model at all. 

Maybe the confusion is caused by accommodating both b) and c) simultaneously.

Returning to the points 

1. It is true that you can do this, see figure 2-6, but you don't have
to. The alternative is to promote the producers and consumers, so they
do become visible at the next level up and then can be wired to a channel
(or promoted further) by the person assembling that composite. That's what
you would do if you were designing libraries of reusable nested event processing
components. On the other hand if you really do have a uniform event bus
concept that spans all your components, we felt it would be unnecessarily
tedious for people to have to do this all the time.

2. I agree that this is awkward. I have always favoured being able to wire
a producer directly to a consumer (effectively having an implicit channel).
You should also be able to choose whether you establish this by setting
@target on the producer or @source on the consumer. That same mechanism
could be used if you have an explicit channel, so you could set the @targets/@sources
on the channel to point at the producers/consumer (effectively what Eric
does in his example of figure 2-4) rather than the other way round.

3. At the moment we accommodate both use cases (completely private or completely
global). Intermediate cases sound interesting, but I am not sure whether
anyone really needs them. Just to be clear on how we'd expect things to
work at the moment... if you look at figure 2-4 you would normally either
wire a producer/consumer (the yellow triangles) to a channel or promote
them. That's what the figure shows. You could promote the consumer for
component 4, in which case it would receive events from the outside AND
events from channel A (which can only have come from components 1 and 2).
One other thing one could consider is allowing the input or output of the
channel (which are in effect producers and consumers themselves) to be
promoted, to allow events from the outside to go directly into channel
A without having to go via components 1 or 2, but again I'm not sure why
that would be useful. 

4. I think modelling the distribution mechanism is a good thing.

Regards 

Peter Niblett
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
Member of the IBM Academy of Technology
+44 1962 815055
+44 7825 657662 (mobile)

From:	Eric Johnson <eric@tibco.com>
To:	OASIS Assembly <sca-assembly@lists.oasis-open.org>
Date:	12/04/2010 17:56
Subject:	Re: [sca-assembly] Fw: [sca-assembly-comment] NEW ISSUE: (1.2) Promotion of consumers and producers undermines composability

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Follow up....

I've just posted to the OASIS documents repository a proposal for ASSEMBLY-227.
http://www.osoa.org/jira/browse/ASSEMBLY-227

I posted in PDF and Word format:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=37272
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=37273

These documents are *not* in anything close to final form:

• OpenOffice did a number of things to slightly mangle the word document
• We need new pictures to show the new channel promotion notion.  I've included my notion of what it would look like below, in the hopes that it will help, although I should add that so far within TIBCO, I've gotten the some disagreement about the proposed artwork.
• I haven't vetted the schema changes.
• Obviously this is still a fork of the current spec, based off of the copy that Anish started from.

However,
before I spent many hours trying to get everything perfect, I figured I
should at least know whether the intent is even close to acceptable to
the TC.

-Eric.

P.S. My current conception of a channel might look like - see diamond at
the bottom edge of the component.




On 04/09/2010 01:19 AM, Mike Edwards wrote: 

Folks, 

Forwarding to the main sca-assembly TC list.... 

Yours,  Mike.

Strategist - Emerging Technologies, SCA & SDO.
Co Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC.
IBM Hursley Park, Mail Point 146, Winchester, SO21 2JN, Great Britain.
Phone & FAX: +44-1962-818014    Mobile: +44-7802-467431  
Email:  mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com
----- Forwarded by Mike Edwards/UK/IBM on 09/04/2010 09:18 -----

From:	Eric Johnson <eric@tibco.com>
To:	sca-assembly-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Date:	08/04/2010 18:18
Subject:	[sca-assembly-comment] NEW ISSUE: (1.2) Promotion of consumers and producers undermines composability

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Target: sca-assembly-1.2-spec-wd01.doc

Title: Promotion of SCA consumers and producers undermines composibility

Description:

In the assembly 1.2 WD 01, consumers and producers are identified as part
of the "component type" of a component, whereas "channels"
are limited in scope to the boundaries of a composite.  This is contrary
to the rest of SCA, where the indication of the communication between components
surfaces in the component type, currently as a service or reference.  When
needed, services or references can establish concrete bindings, but otherwise
communication needs are exposed at the boundary of a composite.  In
the case of producers, consumers, and channels, not only can bindings be
applied, but also "targets", which then either hide endpoints
within a composite, or expose them globally as part of the "global
domain."

This makes composition of applications using eventing more difficult.

Further, although producers and consumers can refer to the same target,
this is an awkward way for these two constructs to establish that they
intend to operate on the same "destination".  When building
a composite the composite developer may wish for one component to produce
for a channel, and a different component to publish on the same channel,
and then promote the combination of producer and consumer.  If the
developer only promotes the consumer, or only promotes the publisher, that
would be misleading to the composites using that component.  Perhaps
it is even an error.

Here, then, are two problems:

• "target" channel references are a weak way to couple the use of the same destination.
• target channel references can be to a domain channel, thus undermining composability - either by collisions in the naming of target channels, or by forcing special knowledge of which channels are used where.

Proposal:

Instead of promoting consumers and producers, promote channels.  Move
the filter and eventType information on consumers and producers into the
channel.

-Eric

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Unless stated otherwise above:
IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598.
Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

---

Unless stated otherwise above:
IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598.
Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

---

Unless stated otherwise above:
IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598.
Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU