Re: [sca-assembly-comment] Ballot closure

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

Jim,

Just to clarify

Both Fabric3 & Tuscany have claimed
compliance to the Assembly specification and those claims have been accepted.

The Assembly spec also requires the
conformance to the SCA policy, web services and one of the language specifications
- regarded as a "coherent set"
by the members of the assembly TC.

Tuscany has claimed conformance to policy,
to web services and to Java - and those claims have been accepted.

What we don't yet have is another SCA
runtime that is able to meet the wider conformance requirements.  This
prevents
the SCA Assembly specification from
moving to Committee Specification status because of the terms of the charter
for
the TC.

This is a pity since there are in fact
a number of implementations of SCA in the marketplace - both open source
and
commercial.  But as you point out,
doing the formal conformance testing is a burden for any project - a burden
that
most projects are unwilling to undertake.
 This is a lesson for future standards work.

Speaking for IBM - IBM does indeed have
a commercial implementation of OASIS SCA in WebSphere.  However, this
is based on some of the code from Tuscany,
so it is not straightforward to claim that it is independent of Tuscany
- 
this is the reason that WebSphere has
not been submitted as a conforming implementation (although it certainly

does conform).


The reason for the ballot to close the
SCA Assembly TC is simply based on the lack of progress - the TC has done
very
little in ~2 years and so I think some
members of the TC considered that there was little point in keeping the
TC going.
If there was a prospect of a second
conforming implementation of SCA coming forward in the near future, then
I think
that members of the TC might take a
different view of the situation.



Yours, Mike

Dr Mike Edwards		Mail Point 137, Hursley Park
STSM		Winchester, Hants SO21 2JN
Cloud Computing & Services Standards		United Kingdom
Chair UK ISO SC38 mirror committee (Cloud & SOA)
Co-Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC
PEPPOL eProcurement team member
IBM Software Group
Phone:	+44-1962 818014 (37248014)
Mobile:	+44-7802-467431 (274097)
e-mail:	mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com

From:	Jim Marino <jim.marino@gmail.com>
To:	sca-assembly-comment@lists.oasis-open.org,
Date:	19/02/2013 16:55
Subject:	[sca-assembly-comment] Ballot closure

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Hi,

It was brought to my attention that the TC is considering
closing.

This caught me by surprise, particularly as it was asserted
that there is only one active implementation, which I assume to be Apache
Tuscany. Fabric3 (www.fabric3.org)
also conforms to the Assembly TC and has active plans to claim conformance
to other specifications. 

Given the breadth of the specifications, conformance requires
a significant time investment. 

Closing the TCs down would derail the investment various
runtimes have made in this effort. In addition, closing the specifications
would hurt the industry in general as no standards exist that cover the
same space as SCA.

Is the only issue prompting a ballot for closure that
lack of two conformant implementations?

Jim

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