[business-transaction] Amended minutes for the BTP March 8 face to face

[William Z Pope <zpope@pobox.com>]

The following minutes have been amended based on comments and discussion
during the March 13the BTP phone conference.

=bill


BTP Face to Face Meeting
March 8, 2002
Hosted by Geoff Brown at Oracle

Overall:

  Meeting was a success.  A draft schedule was produced (included
  below) for release of the spec from committee.  BEA and Oracle
  agreed to close some issues and defer others until after the release
  of the 1.0 spec.  This, along with the issues to be closed by the
  model text will leave us with less than 10 issues open.

Agenda:
- What's needed to move to committee draft
  + Schedule and Dates
  + Primer schedule
- BTP Marketing
- Issues
  + Issues deferred to post 1.0.
  + Conformance

Actions:
----------------------------------------
* Geoff Brown: Oracle to internally review the current SOAP 1.1
  bindings (underway).
* Bill Cox & Mark Potts: Draft of Primer by March 15.
* Bill Pope & Geoff Brown: Draft of Executive Summary.
  Include clear statement of business case for BTP.
* Bill Pope & Mike Leznar: draft press release for BTP committee
  draft. 

Schedule
----------------------------------------
  Needed for completion
  - All issues resolved
  - Primer 
  - Model Completed

  Starting March 11
- 2 weeks to work on raw material
  March 25
- 1 week to produce review draft
* Publish to committee
- 2 week comment period
- 2 weeks of assimilation and editing
* Re-Publish to committee
- 1 week of reading time
- F2F, vote to accept as committee draft
  F2F week of May 13th - May 17th

Issues
----------------------------------------
  - All new issues will be automatically created with state set to
    "deferred until after 1.0".  This makes concrete the decision
    taken at the end of last year.

  SOAP Bindings and other Binding Issues
  - Need to clarify that the binding component is NOT (typically)
    implemented as part of the application.  It is implemented as part
    of a toolkit/library/component. 
  - Are the current toolkits able to implement the BTP bindings.
  - There is a need in the spec to distinguish more clearly between
    what is carried in application messages, what is in the BTP
    messages, and what is or may be shared.  Need to distinguish what
    gets carried on the application transport and what on the BTP
    transport.  It is expected to be common that the application
    communication occurs over one protocol and BTP communication
    occurs over another protocol.

Discussion
========================================

Web Services
  - How much are we targeting BTP towards web services?  These seems
    to have changed over time.  The web services market seems to be
    becoming more important.
  - The initial charter for BTP allowed for web services but was not
    the sole requirement or reason for the spec.
  - The web services market has set end user expectation that web
    services are end-user producible.  This requires a spec with much
    more background and description than a spec targeted
    infrastructure developers.
  - What is the target audience for this specification?  Product
    vendors or end-user/direct users.
  - The current spec is targetted at the TC members, infrastructure
    vendors, and prospective vendors. 
    Large organizations need to be able to at least understand
    (architect, business decider) what BTP is and does.  This is
    another audience of the spec.  Large organizations may want to
    implement some or all of the BTP actors themselves.

Documents to be produced
- Spec
  Target audience: implementors of BTP components
  Protocol specification.
  Peter and all TC
- Primer
  Target audience: web services implementors, architects or others
  required for technical sale
  Technical introduction
  Bill Cox, Mark Potts, and those responding to the call
- Executive summary
  Target audience: end customers of the technology, "the masses"
  Business placement, problem addressed, audience for the spec.
  Expected use.
  Sales tool - "better, cheaper, faster"
  Bill Pope and Geoff Brown


Spec requirements
- Need a clear statement of the impact on consumer application and the
  provider application.
- Consumer application
  Initiator component
  CONTEXT management
  Use of application information
- Can we make the spec more understandable by reducing the document
  E.g., move the state tables to a separate document, normative
  appendix. 
- Add "Next Steps" section to the specification.  This defines areas
  of future work and evolution of the spec.  May give caveats on areas
  that are likely to change.
  For Oracle: need clear statement of business cases for BTP.
- BTP performs "Committment Management"
- Takeup of BTP will likely require helping the understanding by large
  organizations/enterprises of BTP, whether or not they may choose to
  implement the specification.  
  Large organizations will need to UNDERSTAND BTP before making a
  decision to adopt; the minutes reflect a non-consensus on whether
  large organizations will IMPLEMENT BTP.  Some BTP actors/components
  are more likely to be implemented by non-vendors than others i.e.,
  Initiator, Terminator, and Participant.
  There was NOT concensus during the meeting on the IMPLEMENTATION of
  BTP component by end-user organizations.  There was concensus on the
  need for understanding of BTP in large, end-user organizations.

What is BTP?  Benefits and audiences
- Need transactions that work over Internet infrastructure.
  Deployment in replicated environment makes transaction management
  difficult.   In Oracle (design Principle) data is centralized.
  XML pipelining standard needs an underlying interoperation protocol,
  BTP could provide this.  See http://www.w3.org/TF/xml-pipeline
  High performance applications using binary XML.
* Question: Sanjay assumes that BTP provides value for long running
  transactions.  Is this a core assumption for BTP?  Does BTP support
  short lived transactions?  Does it provide value for short lived
  transactions. 
  Need interoperation to sustain and grow the transaction market.
  Value is in stitching together the new and legacy applications over
  the Internet.

- Shareable BTP state
  Need to define the Use Cases that we want to support.
  Open definition of state movement adds a specific value above and
  beyond what exists in any current products.

Marketing of the Specification
  1) what is the business value of BTP
  2) What is the audience for the spec
  3) What is the appropriate level of the spec

  Feedback from OMG web services conference
    The was a lack of understanding of the business problem that BTP
    solves that OTS does not solve.  We need to more clearly address
    what the business need is for BTP. 
  - What is the target implementation market?
  - What is the target deployment market?

  * Need Statement of the Continuation of the Committee
  - 1.1 maintenance draft
  - OASIS standard production
  - New work

  * Common BTP Presentations
  - Shareable within OASIS or the TC
  - Created by the TC
  - Downloadable from BTP web site.

  * Press Releases
    Bill Pope and M Lenzar
  - Get quotes on BTP, high level execs from supporting companies.
    This is needed for the publication of the committee draft release.

  * Publicize activities of TC members


William Z Pope
zpope@pobox.com