Draft of WS-BN decoupled from WS-RF

[David Hull <dmh@tibco.com>]

As part of the ongoing discussion of WS-BaseNotification and its relation to WS-RF, I have put together a very rough draft of an alternate WS-BN spec which allows use of, but does not directly require WS-RF.  That is, NotificationProducers and Subscriptions MAY be presented as WS-RF resources, with the full set of message exchanges that implies, but they do not need to.

As I understand it, this is consistent with WS-RF itself, which allows resources to support message exchanges outside the WS-RF interfaces.  The draft defines a (small) set of get/set messages which are to be implemented directly.  It also describes what the Resource Properties document should look like (it looks like it always did) and mandates that, e.g., set messages that don't make sense MUST fault.

Note that this can be done with any stateful resource that uses WS.  The draft just nails down specifically how to do this for NotificationProducers and Subscribers, leveraging the work that has already been done.  Sections 4.4 and 5.6 could be left out entirely while still preserving the core functionality.

The main changes in the draft (not all of which are essential to the decoupling) are

• Explicitly describing the use of Endpoint References in the spec and the possible dependencies on other WS-specifications.
• Removing the "must follow the implied resource pattern" boilerplate and clarifying the role of the ResourceProperties element in the endpoint references.
• Removing language that suggests that the NotificationProducer MUST produce notifications and making it clear that it can delegate.  This suggests that "NotificationProducer" may not be the best name for this entity, but that's a separate issue.
• Removing language that suggests that a NotificationConsumer must be described in a WSDL.
• Renaming SubscriptionManager to Subscription, reflecting the fact that you send, e.g., PauseSubscription to a particular subscription and not PauseSubscription(subscription ID) to a general SubscriptionManager.
  
• Adding an explicit DestroySubscription message and making use of WS-ResourceLifetime optional.
• Giving Precondition and Selector their own types, for the same reason that TopicExpression has its own type.
• Several other minor edits.

I've made one proofreading pass through the body of the spec and it reads reasonably well.  I would recommend reading the version without highlighted changes before delving into the highlighted version.  The structure of the draft essentially the same as the original (that's the whole point), but the minor changes are pervasive enough to make the highlighted version difficult to read.

I have not updated the WSDL or XSD (yet).  They should not require major changes.

wsn-WS-BaseNotification-1.2-draft-04 (no highights).doc

wsn-WS-BaseNotification-1.2-draft-04.doc