RE: Use cases for IM's

["Burdett, David" <david.burdett@commerceone.com>]

Dan

See comments in line.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Weinreb [mailto:dlw@exceloncorp.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 1:42 PM
To: Burdett, David
Cc: ebxml-msg@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: Use cases for IM's


   Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 12:56:53 -0700
   From: "Burdett, David" <david.burdett@commerceone.com>

   2. It means that external businesses (e.g. Party A) can be given a single
   URL to use to send messages for B, as the Mailroom MSH will forward it to
   the correct application. This means that ...

Just to make quite sure I understand: what's going on here is that BM is
looking inside the ebXML message, at the MessageHeader/To/PartyID element,
in order to determine a URL (or, at least, which of the application nodes)
that the message should be sent to.  So BM *is* interpreting the MS headers.

<db>Exactly. In fact Service and Action can also be used to determine which
application to use.</db>

   3. If B re-organizes its systems internally and wants to move an
application
   to a different URL, then it does not need to notify the external Parties
it
   does business with as the external URL does not change.

So BM can be thought of as an IM running a (perhaps rather simple) "routing
application" of the sort that Chris referred to earlier today when he said:

   We decided in Tokyo that the intermediary node had a "routing
   application" that did the work of routing and forwarding of the
   message to the next node in the message path.

<db>Agreed.</db>

OK.  Let's stop here for the moment, since your points 4 and 5 get
into more complicated issues.

So the key question is whether it's a requirement on us that people be
able to implement the BM functionality in an "unreliable" way, or
whether it's OK for us to say that if you want to do what BM is doing,
you must implement it in a "reliable" way.
<db>
Two are two potential meanings in the point you make:
1. The BM does not implement ebXML RM.
	I'm not sure you mean this, but if it is an ebXML MSH, then it has
to implement ebXML RM as it will need to generate acknowledgments.
2. The server/software that implements the BM functionality is unreliable. 
	You can never guarantee that a server or its software will never
fail. You would always design it to be reliable e.g. using recoverable
databases for persistant storage, but yes I think you have to assume that
the BM can be unreliable. The question is, what is the probability and is
the probability sufficiently low that the consequence of the risk arising
can be ignored.
</db>

-- Dan