Optional Presence vs. required support

[Tom Rutt <tom@coastin.com>]

We need to get some important discussion on the conformance aspects of 
our protocol.

We have several syntactic mechanics which have the presence of a 
subelement in a header
(or an attrbibute of some header subelement) signalling to the receiver 
that a particular
protocol mechanism is in use.

Interoperability would be greatly increased if all our protocol 
mechanisms are requred
to be supported by all RMP (at least on the service instance end).

The Client of the service would be the one always choosing whether the 
protocol feature is used.

I realize that this global interop goal is probably not attainable (not 
everyone needs ordering),
but we should limit the number features which are not required (i.e, 
optionsal) for conformance.

Anyway, we need to use careful wording  in the protocol syntax 
descriptions when an element (or attribute) is specified as "able to be 
not present".  In each case we need to clarify the support
required for conformance claims.

I suggest we could have conformance based on feature:

eg:
- acknowledgment conformance class
- acnlowledged duplicate conformance class
- acknolwedged duplicatate elimination and ordered delivery conformance 
class

Now the next question is if we need to further parameterize our 
conformance claims by
the RM-Reply patterns supported by an implementation:
- response reply pattern
- callback reply pattern
- poll reply pattern


And then again we have the support for request/response WSDL operation 
type.  Is
this going to be another conformance point parameter.

Thus we have 3 by 3 by 2 conformance matrix.  How many of those 3D 
matrix cells do we
want to give separate names to?

Tom Rutt
WSRM Chair




-- 
----------------------------------------------------
Tom Rutt		email: tom@coastin.com; trutt@fsw.fujitsu.com
Tel: +1 732 801 5744          Fax: +1 732 774 5133