Re: [ogsi-wg] RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework

["Mark Little" <mark.little@arjuna.com>]

Ian, maybe I misunderstood your specifications, but I fail to see the
difference: it's syntactic sugar as far as I can see. What gives you the
impression that WS-Context cannot be used to model stateful resources? How
you unambiguously identify a stateful instance of an object or service is by
some unique identification process. WS-Context allows a series of messages
directed at a specific endpoint to be correlated by a unique identifier that
can be interpreted by that endpoint to represent some back-end state. Seems
exactly the same patter that is illustrated in your ModelingState document
on page 12.

As with many things I'm sure we could argue this until the proverbial cows
come home, but WS-Context does allow for the management and manipulation of
stateful instances as first class entities in a Web services environment. As
Savas mentioned, this was shown in an earlier paper, so I won't reiterate it
here.

All the best,

Mark.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Foster" <foster@mcs.anl.gov>
To: "Savas Parastatidis" <Savas.Parastatidis@newcastle.ac.uk>; "Newcomer,
Eric" <Eric.Newcomer@iona.com>
Cc: <ws-caf@lists.oasis-open.org>; <ogsi-wg@gridforum.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 10:34 PM
Subject: Re: [ogsi-wg] RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework


Eric:

We (the WSRF authors) are very familiar with WS-Context and certainly agree
that it has an important role to play.

However, we also believe that there are important situations in which
stateful resources need to be identified and managed as first-class
entities: thus WS-Resource Framework. Thus the enthusiastic response we are
seeing to the proposal from the IBM and HP Web services teams, as well as
many others.

Ian.

At 10:06 PM 1/22/2004 +0000, Savas Parastatidis wrote:



Dear Eric,



I agree with your comments. In fact, back in August 2003 we used WS-Context
as an example of how stateful interactions and/or distributed units of work
could be modelled. This was part of our proposals for a WSA-friendly
framework for building Grid applications (http://www.neresc.ac.uk/ws-gaf).



Regards,

--
Savas Parastatidis
http://savas.parastatidis.name



From: Newcomer, Eric [mailto:Eric.Newcomer@iona.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 6:28 PM
To: Mark Little; Savas Parastatidis; ws-caf@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework



I have the general impression of the OGSA specs as the equivalence of CORBA.



On the topic of the WS-Resource Framework in particular, I've looked through
the specs and I think WS-Context could have been used, and it's unfortunate
it wasn't.  I suppose the Resource Framework effort grew out of the Grid
work however so it has a completely independent origin.



I also agree that I can't see a practical difference between context
management in transactions and the context management defined for the
Resource Framework.



It would be nice to try to converge these things at some point and in some
organization - is that OASIS?

_______________________________________________________________
Ian Foster                    www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster
Math & Computer Science Div.  Dept of Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory   The University of Chicago
Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.     Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.
Tel: 630 252 4619             Fax: 630 252 1997
        Globus Alliance, www.globus.org <http://www.globus.org/>