RE: WS CAF FAQ v5 (concall notice)

Please add the following question and answer to the 
WS-CAF FAQ  (I hope this satisfies a commitment I made a while ago to do 
this)

How is WS-CAF related to ASAP?

The 
Asynchronous Service Access Protcol is another OASIS working group started 
recently to standardize certain types of web service interactions.  In 
essence, ASAP is answering the need to be able to start a service at one point 
in time, and then come back later to check on the status.  ASAP also 
includes a way for the initiator to leave an address for the service to send a 
notification message back to to tell it that it is completed.  In this 
nomenclature an "Asynchronous Web Service" is Web Service that implementes 
standard operations to support starting and monitoring of a task which is expect 
to take a long time to complete.

In contrast to this, WS-CAF is aimed to 
handle the problem of how to contact multiple web services, and to coordinate 
these interactions.  In essence, it is to allow multiple web services to 
act as if they were part of a single composite application.

The purpose 
of these two standards efforts are orthogonal to each other.  If you wanted 
to use ASAP in order to start two different asynchronous services in a 
coordinated manner, you would use WS-CAF tags in the header of the requests to 
make sure that either both services are start or neither are started.  This 
could not be accomplished using ASAP alone.  While WS-CAF allows 
(different) web services to coordinated, it does not say anything about the 
actual request that is being made.  ASAP specifies the actual request that 
must be made to achieve a particular outcome.

The goal then in both 
groups is to coordinate their efforts to be sure that implementors can use both 
standards at the same time.

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(Hopefullly you all agree?)

-Keith

 

Keith D Swenson, 
Fujitsu 
Software Corporation
3055 Orchard Dr. San Jose, CA, 95134
(408) 456-7667 
mobile: (408) 859-1005