Re: [sca-assembly] Re: [sca-assembly-comment] Ballot closure

[Jim Marino <jim.marino@gmail.com>]

Hi Mike,

Fabric3 does have plans to pass the other required specifications so it would indeed be a pity to try and close the TC prematurely. Unfortunately, perhaps due to misunderstanding, no one contacted me or other Fabric3 committers recently (at least since the beginning of last year as I recall) to ask about our plans.

My company is also building a commercial product around SCA so there is widespread SCA support both in open source and commercially, particularly for a standard that has not yet been finalized. In addition, we have received strong uptake and SCA has proven to be an excellent technology in a number of diverse applications: government (legacy integration), financial services (low-latency), and telco (highly-reliable back-office). Based on implementation experience, I can say that without SCA those projects would have taken significantly longer and risked failure if based on other, existing technologies.

If this means Tuscany and Fabric3 have to carry the burden of bringing the standards to closure, I guess that will have to be the case. 

<soapbox>

As you said, I also believe there are important lessons for future standardization work. In particular, some member organizations pushed *very* hard for complex, far-reaching, and time consuming exit criteria. I think that is fine if those members were/are prepared to invest resources in achieving those goals. However, that has not been the case. When we explained the challenge of the current exit criteria, there was not a willingness by the "hardliners" to reconsider or offer to help move the process forward. Of course there were some notable exceptions in the TC, but the consequence has been that those arguing for a less complicated and far-reaching approach are now left with investing the resources to complete tasks that are not directly relevant to our user base. 

</soapbox>

 

Now that I'm off my soapbox, I want to say unequivocally that Fabric3 will claim conformance to the remaining required specifications: the Web Services binding, Policy, and an implementation. Based on our track record with Fabric3 and assembly conformance, I don't think there should be any question of our ability to deliver on this promise.

Can we please reconsider closing the TC and instead work towards finalizing it? 

Jim

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Mike Edwards <mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com> wrote:

Jim,

Just to clarify

Both Fabric3 & Tuscany have claimed compliance to the Assembly specification and those claims have been accepted.

The Assembly spec also requires the conformance to the SCA policy, web services and one of the language specifications
- regarded as a "coherent set" by the members of the assembly TC.

Tuscany has claimed conformance to policy, to web services and to Java - and those claims have been accepted.

What we don't yet have is another SCA runtime that is able to meet the wider conformance requirements.  This prevents
the SCA Assembly specification from moving to Committee Specification status because of the terms of the charter for
the TC.

This is a pity since there are in fact a number of implementations of SCA in the marketplace - both open source and
commercial.  But as you point out, doing the formal conformance testing is a burden for any project - a burden that
most projects are unwilling to undertake.  This is a lesson for future standards work.

Speaking for IBM - IBM does indeed have a commercial implementation of OASIS SCA in WebSphere.  However, this
is based on some of the code from Tuscany, so it is not straightforward to claim that it is independent of Tuscany -
this is the reason that WebSphere has not been submitted as a conforming implementation (although it certainly
does conform).


The reason for the ballot to close the SCA Assembly TC is simply based on the lack of progress - the TC has done very
little in ~2 years and so I think some members of the TC considered that there was little point in keeping the TC going.
If there was a prospect of a second conforming implementation of SCA coming forward in the near future, then I think
that members of the TC might take a different view of the situation.



Yours, Mike

Dr Mike Edwards		Mail Point 137, Hursley Park
STSM		Winchester, Hants SO21 2JN
Cloud Computing & Services Standards		United Kingdom
Chair UK ISO SC38 mirror committee (Cloud & SOA)
Co-Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC
PEPPOL eProcurement team member
IBM Software Group
Phone:	+44-1962 818014 (37248014)
Mobile:	+44-7802-467431 (274097)
e-mail:	mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com

From:	Jim Marino <jim.marino@gmail.com>
To:	sca-assembly-comment@lists.oasis-open.org,
Date:	19/02/2013 16:55
Subject:	[sca-assembly-comment] Ballot closure

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Hi,

It was brought to my attention that the TC is considering closing.

This caught me by surprise, particularly as it was asserted that there is only one active implementation, which I assume to be Apache Tuscany. Fabric3 (www.fabric3.org) also conforms to the Assembly TC and has active plans to claim conformance to other specifications. 

Given the breadth of the specifications, conformance requires a significant time investment. 

Closing the TCs down would derail the investment various runtimes have made in this effort. In addition, closing the specifications would hurt the industry in general as no standards exist that cover the same space as SCA.

Is the only issue prompting a ballot for closure that lack of two conformant implementations?

Jim

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