RE: [wsbpel] Issue 53 - Motion for consideration by the TC

["Satish Thatte" <satisht@microsoft.com>]

Alastair,

As you know I recognize the importance of business transactions and
process coordination.  However, as I said during the call today, I have
serious concerns about the specific approach you are proposing

1. It uses a vanilla outcome notification rather than
application-defined operations.  As such I don't see how application
data will be transmitted along with the notifications.  This is
analogous to the issue we had internally within BPEL (issue#3) regarding
compensation handlers getting access to "global state".

2. The simple outcome-notification for cancel/confirm is just one
stylized pattern for process coordination.  Other patterns are possible
-- for instance one where the original work (e.g., a purchase order) may
be changed rather than just cancelled/confirmed.  But with the explicit
handler approach this would require additional syntactic extensions (a
change handler?).

3.  We can already model these stylized patterns using existing BPEL
mechanisms as I tried to illustrate with my presentation at the F2F
(just uploaded to TC site under "related resources").

4.  I believe the details of actually making this work with multiple
concrete coordination protocols will get very hairy in practice, and
could become a rather serious problem for interoperability.

Even if we cannot agree that the "design pattern" approach I suggested
is the right approach for the long term, I think we can agree that our
priority should be to correct, clarify and complete the feature set we
already have in BPEL, which is large and complex enough, and where we
still have significant technical difficulties to work through (e.g.,
issue#10).

If we want to finish the work of this TC by the middle of 2004, I would
strongly urge that we (at a minimum) defer this new feature dimension to
a later version when it can be given the scope of effort it deserves.  

Satish
________________________________________
From: Green, Alastair J. [mailto:Alastair.Green@choreology.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 5:55 AM
To: wsbpel@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [wsbpel] Issue 53 - Motion for consideration by the TC

Please find attached a motion for consideration as new business, and
some related notes.

Thanks,

Alastair