RE: [ogsi-wg] RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework

["Newcomer, Eric" <Eric.Newcomer@iona.com>]

Ian,

 

Yes, congratulations are in order to you and for your specs, and for the publicity you are gathering for your efforts.  We can certainly cite a very similar positive reception and initial publicity for our own work.

 

As a general statement the industry as a whole would benefit, rather than just some parts of it, from the combination of our efforts. Would you agree? 

 

The point is that WS-Context spec certainly could have been used as the basis for the Resource Framework, despite the nuance you note about stateful resources being treated as first class citizens.  This is a detail of the spec rather than a technical impediment. 

 

In general context is used solely and completely for the purpose of sharing state.  True, the WS-Context specification does not spell out in detail how it can be used with resources, and the spec is not written to constrain WS-Context to that purpose only, but in practice every implementation of transactional context, from which WS-Context is derived, is used for sharing resource state.

 

Thanks,

 

Eric 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Foster [mailto:foster@mcs.anl.gov]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 5:34 PM
To: Savas Parastatidis; Newcomer, Eric
Cc: ws-caf@lists.oasis-open.org; ogsi-wg@gridforum.org
Subject: Re: [ogsi-wg] RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework

Eric:

We (the WSRF authors) are very familiar with WS-Context and certainly agree that it has an important role to play.

However, we also believe that there are important situations in which stateful resources need to be identified and managed as first-class entities: thus WS-Resource Framework. Thus the enthusiastic response we are seeing to the proposal from the IBM and HP Web services teams, as well as many others.

Ian.

At 10:06 PM 1/22/2004 +0000, Savas Parastatidis wrote:

Dear Eric,

 

I agree with your comments. In fact, back in August 2003 we used WS-Context as an example of how stateful interactions and/or distributed units of work could be modelled. This was part of our proposals for a WSA-friendly framework for building Grid applications (http://www.neresc.ac.uk/ws-gaf).

 

Regards,

--
Savas Parastatidis
http://savas.parastatidis.name
 

From: Newcomer, Eric [mailto:Eric.Newcomer@iona.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 6:28 PM
To: Mark Little; Savas Parastatidis; ws-caf@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] WS-Resource Framework

 

I have the general impression of the OGSA specs as the equivalence of CORBA.

 

On the topic of the WS-Resource Framework in particular, I've looked through the specs and I think WS-Context could have been used, and it's unfortunate it wasn't.  I suppose the Resource Framework effort grew out of the Grid work however so it has a completely independent origin.

 

I also agree that I can't see a practical difference between context management in transactions and the context management defined for the Resource Framework.

 

It would be nice to try to converge these things at some point and in some organization - is that OASIS?

_______________________________________________________________
Ian Foster                    www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster
Math & Computer Science Div.  Dept of Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory   The University of Chicago   
Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.     Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.
Tel: 630 252 4619             Fax: 630 252 1997
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