Re: [cam] Context for SOAs

["David RR Webber" <david@drrw.info>]

Joe,

Most definately - web services have just as much need as
traditional B2B systems.

So - YES - nothing to stop you using CAM with web
services - and in fact I posted some draft WSDL
bindings for possible use by CAM - where CAM
itself is a web service - I think this is likely the
most obvious early use case in a web service SOA.

And when we moved the specification to OASIS we explicitly
removed all references to ebXML so as to present a neutral
approach to this.  So far however the WS* world has largely
ignored CAM.

There may be some intrinsic reasons for this.   I did spend
some time on the WSBPEL TC list looking at the their
transaction methods, but they are marching to a different
drum.  BPEL itself creates and writes transaction
information.

Web services exchanges by nature tend to be small
packets of information that are tightly coupled to some
process.  Therefore its more of a "blackbox" where the
programmers "know" about their data and links and
switches and the business users just seek some
overall result or decision. In many ways this is
very CORBAesque - (certainly WRT BPEL).

Web services have not seriously looked at large
transaction exchanges - in the same way as ebXML -
since they lack those kinds of tools to date to replicate
what ebXML is doing - for reliable and secure
message delivery between hundreds of trading partners
using business CPA models that are reusable.  Again
the way WSDL is engineered and moving is in a very
different direction from CPA here.

I do expect that we will see CAM being used in
web service environments eventually.  Right now
however it seems that the WS* community is very
"eyes down" on a raft of other engineering issues
and that to date their simple information exchanges
have not caused them to need to look further afield.
XSLT, XQuery, XPath and Java have been the
tools of choice for the programmers involved.

An SOA involving ebXML however would be
expected to fully leverage what CAM has to offer
to manage payloads and transaction formats for
a business audience.

You can see that worldview of SOA from the
work of the OASIS BCM team, and how
CAM fits in with the layered approach for
SOA systems.

The WS-CAF work is very limited in its
treatment of context - you can see that from
their examples and spec'.  Again the OASIS BCM
team have developed the Choice Points specification
that provides a complete context system that
takes over from where CAF leaves off (which is
pretty early since CAF is very limited).

If you combine Choice Points with CAM you have
the complete top-to-bottom ability to deploy
context driven systems.

Within OASIS I would like to see the CAF team
starting to look at BCM Choice Points as their
next generation toolset.

Eric Newcome has of course intentionally
excluded such thoughts from his companies
technology vision - so I'd not expect him to
be very forthcoming in these areas!

Hope that helps!

DW.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>
To: "CAM" <cam@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 12:11 PM
Subject: [cam] Context for SOAs


> I just attended an excellent session on SOAs given by IONA (Eric
> Newcomer), Gartner, and [one of my company's competitors]. The idea of
> context for services came to my mind.
>
> More specifically, let's say that we have multiple service consumers in
> an SOA, but one particular consumer has a need to have its own
> context-driven version of a message or operation in a WSDL document that
> is being discovered. The OASIS WS-CAF TC does not cover this aspect of
> context (I verified with Eric Newcomer) - is this something we're
> considering covering in CAM?
>
> Thanks,
> Joe
>
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