WS-CAF vs WS-GAF

["Savas Parastatidis" <Savas.Parastatidis@newcastle.ac.uk>]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting again and for the non-technical content of
this message.

Since I started forwarding messages from one mailing to the other, many
have asked me the same question. I apologise for the confusion I may
have caused but I would like to clarify:

WS-CAF has nothing to do with WS-GAF. The two are completely unrelated.

WS-CAF stands for Web Services Composite Application Framework and it is
an OASIS Technical Committee for few months now. Its purpose in life is
to standardise the WS-Context, WS-CoordinationFramework, and
WS-TransactionManagement specifications. Many companies are involved. I
am an observing member of the group since I like their approach and how
they deal with stateful interactions but nothing more than that. The
archives of their mailing list can be found at
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ws-caf/. Unfortunately, as Martin
Westhead has pointed out to me and Peter Lane find out, one has to be an
OASIS member to subscribe to the mailing list (apologies for suggesting
that people should subscribe without checking first).


WS-GAF stands for Web Services Grid Application Framework and is our
proposal for building Grid applications and the name given to describe
the document we released back in August (see
http://www.neresc.ac.uk/ws-gaf). Information about our mailing list can
be found at http://www.neresc.ac.uk/ws-gaf/mailing-list.html (you don't
have to be a member of any organisation to subscribe but if you are a
company and you want to send us money we wouldn't say "no" :-) WS-GAF
just happened to use WS-Context as a way to illustrate the benefits of
contextualisation when building service-oriented applications, and hence
the loose link with WS-CAF. Confused??? Sorry!


Again, apologies for abusing the mailing lists but I wanted to point out
the differences.

Best regards,
--
Savas Parastatidis
http://savas.parastatidis.name (now blogging)