Draft Minutes 18 July 2005

["Martin Chapman" <martin.chapman@oracle.com>]

Thanks Alastair.

_________________________________________________________________
Martin Chapman                                 
Consulting Member of Technical Staff           
Oracle                                        
P: +353 87 687 6654                           
e: martin.chapman@oracle.com                   
WS-CAF TC 18 July 2005, Convened 16.05 BST, adjourned 17.00 BST.

Present MC, EN, ML, PF, DB, AG, GP, SG, JF (prospective), PW (nine out of 11 voting members present) 
Absent ,KC (apologies sent), AF (Loa)

AG appointed scribe.

1. Approve the minutes from the F2F meeting.

No comments. ML motion to adopt. Seconded DB. Adopted.

2. Review the AIs

A. Kevin Connor has come up with a proposa for standalone interop demo. Ongoing.

B. Editors to remove ALS outstanding refs etc in ACID, ML confident this has been actioned in latest version of the ACID spec. DONE

C. Text to address issue 273 (policies for isolation level)

GP: related to AI on policies in general. Will take AI to come up with a strawman text. Agreed.

D. Proposal for boxcarring registration. ML has put this forward. E-mail discussion in progress. Substantive discussion will be taken up under point 9. DONE

E. Address asynchrony issue: GP. Part of the discussion on checked transactions. No write-up yet. This and AI F will be done prior to next conf. call. Issues raised by AG re WS-A need to be looked at. Ongoing

F. Policy. Ongoing

G. All members to check for a discussion on IPR. Ongoing

3. WS-Context

Public review of WS-Context requested of Jamie as of date of F2F meeting. Have heard nothing, despite daily e-mails. no clarification of any potential problems. No response from OASIS staff whatsoever.

WS-N PR docs have been sent out in the interim 7/7. Do not know what is going on. TC admin unresponsive. Likewise WS-RF materials sent out on the same date. 

4. Status of WS-CF.

Waiting for schema and WSDL updates. Action: KC. Estimated completion end of this week. Perhaps go for a CD. Maybe new revisions may result from WS-ACID. MC: still worth doing CD and PR, even if subsequent implications from transaction specs come in. AG: prioritize ACID issues that impact on CF.

5. Where are we on interops: no proposals sent out on demo of CF, KC absent. If standalone, what can be demonstrated? ML: KC expects to have that out this week.

6. IPR mode

Additional considerations:

IPR transition policy: implication that this should happen as soon as possible. Not so, no obligation to transition. 

TC process rules are in effect independent. 60-day disclosures etc not in effect. Anything to do with IPR. 

If change the IPR mode, then all contributions that have been made would have to be reasserted under the new IPR policy.

Special RF modes. RF-RAND and RF-Limited only alternatives. 

AG: How complicated would it be to do this? Would it be a backward step? MC: Comes down to reactions of the original contributors.

Old IPR policy in charter: intention to be royalty-free. 

DB, answer AG question differently. Completely comfortable checking with Sun's lawyers, remake contrib, foresee no difficulties. Downside in terms of time, Oracle, IONA, and so on down the line. Unsure about approaching Fujitsu, but no longer in the TC. Not sure what that means in terms of transition. A) Is it possible with some companies not present, B) the time lost.

GP: Similar concerns at Oracle: lost cycles versus perceived benefit. MC Old IPR policy is effectively same words, just not as tight. 

Old policy. RF mode. 

AG: Worry about indistinct policy re patent infringement licensing, arriving at situation where specs are clouded by lack of clarity etc. 

MC will talk to Jamie re comparison of effect of existing IP policy versus new IP modes. 

ACTION: MC to check with Jamie and report back on the delta, so that the TC can consider further.

7. WS-Acid: feedback and issues.

Those that affect CF first. Boxcarring, context reply.

AG: Recommend look at BTP where these issues were dealt with successfully. The wished-for layer that should magic the boxcarring problem away still doesn't exist, some years on from BTP. Layering anyway complicated by cross-over of vectorizaton and context reply.  Like GP's desire to put this into WS-CF, and this means that we must look beyond WS-Acid to ensure we have dealt with the general case. GP: want to collect some more datapoints on issues raised by AG, for example in WS-A not clear whether possible to use the EPRs as referencing devices for specific services. Support for a metadata buckets: refs to service information from the WSDL description. Not clear that this is well-defined enough to allow identifying elements to be specified and used.  identity-like elements. GP will take action on researching that issue. GP, secondly: EPR hiding WS-A. Moving incrementally towards WS-A. 

Discussion of checked transactions: BPEL serializable scopes could use atomic transactions. Asynchronous message passing poses problem of checking. Should we provides guidelines at our level. How can we take advantage of request correlation capablilities. There could also be a BPEL-specific approach. MC: Have agreed to adopt WS-A.However, when? GP they're in last call. Wait for that? 

GP/AG: we must first of all resolve if checking (knowledge of inferiors present) has to be capable of preceding knowledge of application completion. If that is so, we need counting and identity of inferiors, and if that is so then AG point becomes relevant: maintaining the abstract EPR notion in order to cover potential lack of identity in WS-A is also posed.

PF: two kinds of identifier: guaranteed unique, and app-generated -- both need to be made visible, not buried in the opacity of the addressing system. 

8. AOB
No other business.

Next meeting in two weeks.