BEA Systems Intentes to vote No on UBL Naming and Design Rules

["Hal Lockhart" <hlockhar@bea.com>]

BEA Systems intends to vote No on making UBL NDR an OASIS Standard once the voting period commences on December 16th. Our reasons are contained in the comment below which we will post with our No vote. We are posting this message to the organizational voting list to make our intentions known to the voting members as we realize only TC members are likely to examine the votes which have been cast.

Hal Lockhart
Organizational Representative - BEA Systems, Inc.


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BEA Systems votes no on UBL Naming and Design Rules v1.0 as an OASIS Standard.  BEA commented during the public review that we believe that distributed extensibility and versioning is a key architectural component of distributed systems and UBL should allow for distributed extensibility [1].  The UBL TC responded to the effect that exchanging business documents where one side did not have the extension schema - what we have called distributed compatible extensibility - is not in business interests because both sides must understand any extensions for continued exchange.  We believe that this requirement - that all parties in an exchange must simultaneously deploy new schemas and semantic understanding - is too onerous for business scenarios.  There is a long history of compatible evolution of business documents that could be formalized and fostered by UBL.  We are very concerned that this design will lead to very tightly coupled and brittle business systems. We are also concerned that this specification will act as an undesirable model for other specifications.


1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-comment/200410/msg00000.html
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