WS-TX Day 2 Preliminary minutes

Minutes - OASIS WS-TX - November 17, 2005

Secretary - Paul Knight

PRELIMINARY MEETING MINUTES

Day 2 of initial WS-TX F2F, Cupertino, CA - Nov. 16-17, 2005

(Agenda item numbers continued from Day 1)

Eric Newcomer opened the meeting.

Meeting will use the TC chatroom facility, at http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room/wstx .

Review of agenda.

Agenda accepted.

9.2 Complete planning of F2F dates

Eric Newcomer presented a suggestion for F2F meetings:

IBM host in North Carolina in February 2006.

Iona host in Dublin in May or June 2006.

Date preference votes

Can live with dates:

Feb 6 in raleigh - 14 in room, 12 on phone

March 6 in Raleigh, - 17 in room, 10 on phone

March 13 - 20 in room, 9 on phone

Cannot attend -

Feb 6 - 9 in room, 3 on phone

March 6 - 5 in room, 5 on phone

March 13 - 3 in room, 2 on phone

March 14-15, Tuesday-Wednesday is chosen

Date preferences for Second F2F:

May-June

may 8 - collocate with OASIS? discussion was against this date

can live with:

15 may in room - 20 , 9 on phone

29 May in room - 23 , 9 on phone

5 June - 18 in room, 7 on phone

cannot attend:

15 may - in room - 2, 0 on phone

29 may - in room - 0, on phone - 0

5 june - 6 in room, 3 on phone.

29 May week is selected

Conflict with WS-RX meeting is not anticipated this week, so Wednesday-Thursday (May 31-June 1) seems reasonable. Paul Cotton noted that this will probably entail North American attendees leaving Monday evening for arrival in Dublin by noon Tuesday.

Final dates for next two F2F meetings:

March 14-15 (Tuesday-Wednesday) in Raleigh, hosted by IBM

May 31-June 1 (Wednesday-Thursday) in Dublin, hosted by Iona

9.3 Choreology comments

Alastair Green presented the Choreology comments on core issues.

He had sent his slides to the mailing list earlier, as well as a detailed document.

Focus is "making sure WS-BA fulfils its stated purpose well", including following points:

- Two coordination protocols or one?

- “Fault on Close”: supporting compensation-based business transactions, delivering the specification model requirements

- Selective outcome (mixed outcome) and composition

BTP (OASIS Business Transaction Protocol) was earlier work in this area.

Several elements of BTP are considered valuable for inclusion in WS-BA.

"Compensations" model needs to be well understood for WS-BA. Alastair provided references and historical analysis. The structured hierarchical model may not be applicable to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment we face with Web Services.

It is likely (60% or more of cases) that data structures created during transactions will need to be cleaned up after the completion of the transaction, without explicit messages directing the clean-up.

Coordinating workflows on two sides is difficult. BPEL really does not address this well.

Ian: drawing the transaction boundaries is the crux of the issue.

Alastair: Provisional-final may be a good approach. This allows a path from "closing" to "faulting." (Fault on close).

Paul C: if this is added later to the spec, will it break implementations based on an earlier version?

Consensus is that it would break those implementations. (Alastair, Tom Freund, Eric Newcomer, Martin Chapman)

Eric categorized the main points:

- Approach of do-compensate vs. provisional

- specs not meeting the charter requirements

Alastair: the current specs do not fully satisfy the requirements of the charter or their own stated intents.

Martin: Our (Oracle's) primary use case is BPEL, and the current spec matches the needs of BPEL.

Alastair: fine, this proposed change (fault on close) still supports BPEL.

We need to take this opportunity to support the requirements, otherwise we will shut out these flexible transaction requirements.

Tom Freund: The state diagrams are in the document mostly for information, not as normative material. Adding the fault on close is somewhat informational. We don't preclude composition of BA and AT, we just don't talk about it. There are combinations of BA and AT.

Sazi Temel - Adding the fault on close changes the behavior of the coordinator.

Alastair: We need to call out the changes.

ACTION: Alastair to clarify the changes to the state tables needed to address his proposed changes.

Method of addressing this action point will be clarified in the next agenda item, discussion of the issues list.

Is the fault an indication of catastrophic failure?

Alastair: the failure may be a business issue (business exception), not necessarily catastrophic, but we need to send a signal that the complex action of the contract promise has not been completed. It is likely to be across administrative domains, where it may be inappropriate to express detailed fault information. We simply want to know if the contract is not being completed.

Another way to view this is that the outcome decision was X, but the outcome result was Y... we need to communicate this situation.

10. WS-TX issues list, Chairs

Eric Newcomer led the discussion of handling the issues list.

A format similar to WS-RX will be used. Peter Furniss will assist Colleen with the issues list.

ACTION: Colleen will distribute description of the formats for the issue handling process, by next week.

Eric suggests that issues should be in separate emails, with specific suggestions (including text recommendations).

Martin: suggest we accept all issues, then dispose later, not spend a lot of time deciding if something is an issue or not. There was general support for adopting this approach.

ACTION: ERIC to work with editors to produce line-numbered versions of documents to coordinate comments.

Discussion of need for line numbered documents. Sometimes it is necessary to give a general discussion, but line numbers should/must be included in change proposals.

Name spaces? Should be the first issue raised after the OASIS formatted (line numbered) versions are available.

ACTION: Editors (Mark, Tom, Max) to produce OASIS formatted documents or send email with date of availability, by end of next week.

Paul C: after Thursday meeting, issue list should be updated by the following Monday

ACTION: Chairs to submit agendas, issue lists, and action items in a timely fashion before meetings.

Tom Rutt: Use Kavi Action Item tracker? Agreement to try this.

Secretary should move action items into Kavi.

11. Any other business

There was a general thanks given to Bob Freund, Eisaku Nishiyama, and Hitachi for sponsoring the meeting. Bob expressed thanks to the participants, and Hitachi's continuing support for the goals of the TC.

12. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned.

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