Response to the Microsoft Public Review Comments on the SCA AssemblySpecification (from Issue 132)

The SCA Assembly technical committee
thanks Microsoft for its comments on the SCA Assembly Model specification,

as contained in:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/sca-assembly-comment/200906/msg00001.html

The Assembly technical committee took
a decision at its Face-to-Face meeting in December 2009 to take no action

in response to the Microsoft comments,
with the result that the relevant parts of the specification are left unchanged.

The Assembly TC debated the points made
by Microsoft at some length, with a variety of ideas being considered.

However, the committee was unable to
agree on an alternative approach to the question of conformance which did

not have the effect of making "conformance
to the SCA Assembly specification" a rather meaningless statement.

As a result, the SCA Assembly specification,
version 1.1 has conformance that is tied to the use of at least one of

the implementation types standardized
at OASIS and which is also tied to the test suite available at OASIS.

The Assembly TC remains open to loosening
the conformance requirements in a future release of the SCA Assembly

specification and welcomes input from
Microsoft and other parties who have useful ideas in this area. One  

significant problem that was debated
at length is how an OASIS TC can lay down meaningful criteria for some

future implementation type that does
not get standardized at OASIS and require that those criteria are met for
any 

conforming runtime.  A similar
associated problem exists for the Test Suite, since although the Assembly
test suite is 

carefully structured to be as independent
of implementation type as possible and is also easily adaptable to a new

implementation type, an executable version
of the test suite inevitably involves at least one implementation type
- 

ensuring that a valid test suite exists
when using that new implementation type has proved particularly problematic,

since passing the test suite is one
of the conformance requirements. 

Yours,  Mike.

Strategist - Emerging Technologies,
SCA & SDO.

Co Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC.

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