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RE: [ws-caf] deriving from RE: [ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Title: Message
Sorry
to put a dampener on things, but I don't think this is the appropriate forum for
discussing whether the patent itself is valid or not.
Guy
has done the right thing to alert the committee of the existence of the patent,
and we need to asses whether it has any
impact
on the spec work or not. This is not that same as contesting the patent (or
whatever the right legal term is).
Cheers,
Martin.
-----Original Message-----
From: Newcomer, Eric
[mailto:]
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003
9:57 PM
To: Furniss, Peter;
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] deriving from RE:
[ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Peter,
Apologies for the confusion, I did type BTP when I meant
Choreology. But I think the argument is the same, whether the mapping is
done at the endpoint or at the coordinator is an endless debate because both
are valid solutions.
The
multi-protocol issue is handled by a coordinator-coordinator protocol, which
is the advantage of doing the mapping at the coordinator. You can have
multiple coordinators get involved in bridging otherwise incompatible
protocols.
Sometimes I have the feeling that what Choreology is saying would be
right, if only everyone would agree with you. But that sounds like a
tautology, and therefore Choreology should be open to debate -unless of course
you firmly believe you will convince everyone that you are
right!
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: Furniss, Peter
[mailto:]
Sent: Thursday, December 11,
2003 4:47 PM
To:
Subject:
[ws-caf] deriving from RE: [ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Eric,
I
don't follow your description in the second paragraph below. Choreology (not
BTP) are arguing that the protocols are essentially the same, and therefore
there is no need to have multiple ones - mapping between them is rather easy
and will only be necessary if future legacy has multiple ways of expressing
the same thing. If the coordinator does the bridging, it can only be
valid if the protocols are equivalent. If the semantics are so different
that the same community was forced to use different protocols, how can they
be bridged ?
Or
are you saying that a WS-CAF coordinator (for one transaction) might be
simultaneously handling multiple protocols from the ws-txm family, using one
p'col to some of the participants, a different one to others ? In
which case, it's just a question of whether that distinction is made by
different messages or different qualifications of the same messages -
different verbs or different adverbs.
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Newcomer,
Eric [mailto:]
Sent: 11 December 2003
18:47
To: Green, Alastair J.; Mark Little; Guy Pardon; Greg
Pavlik
Cc: Robin Cover; ;
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Alastiar,
Thanks very much for this analysis and comment on the patent
issue.
With regard to the "confusion" betwen WS=T/WS-TXM and BTP
proponents, I tend to describe it very differently. Either you
resolve the differences among transaction protocols and models at the
endpoints (which BTP proposes to do by requiring them to all implement a
common protocol) or you ask the coordinator to do the bridging at the
"hub" or in this case the distributed hub.
A good analogy for this debate is the transformation debate,
whether it should be done at the hub, at the endpoints, or both. I
would say that the transformation argument isn't settled (and may never
be) because both are important and "it depends" on what you're doing as to
which solution, or combination of solutions is best. That's what
we're essentially saying in WS-CAF, use the solution that's right for the
situation. Don't remove the "it depends" from the equation since you'll
never settle the argument.
With regard to compensation, I'd refer everyone to the recent
discussion at WS-BPEL. Although I didn't attend and therefore am
basing this only on the presentation, I'd have to say it looks like the
problems with a purely compensation-based approach were highlighted.
What order do you process the compensations? What happens when
there's a failure in the compensation? Do you compensate the
compensation? Does this affect the order? Etc.
Use the right tool for the right job, let's not say there's only
one tool in the toolbox that's capable of doing anything
valuable.
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: Green, Alastair J.
[mailto:]
Sent: Thursday,
December 11, 2003 1:09 PM
To: Mark Little; Newcomer, Eric; Guy
Pardon; Greg Pavlik
Cc: Robin Cover;
;
Subject: RE:
[ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Guy,
Thanks for
notifying us all of this patent. I found it a very useful summary of
loosely-coupled transactional issues.
I have to say
that I question the novelty of the claimed “invention”, which seems (at
a very hasty first reading) to boil down to interposition (transaction
bridging) plus a global transaction id.
I believe that
the following publications, products or standards very likely
incorporate the key features of this “invention” and are prior
art:
CCR
OSI/TP
OMG
OTS
Transarc Encina
I suspect the
Arjuna research project dating back to the
late eighties may also incorporate features of relevance to the claim of
invention. Mark would be better qualifed to
comment than I.
I also believe
that the innards of many transactional products, and the utilization
patterns of databases to achieve high concurrency through application
locking which are employed by thousands of end-users, will also betray
many similar key features.
The cluster of
problems that make application- (service-) level coordination difficult
today for the assemblers of business processes which utilize interacting
systems includes many issues which are just practical (integration with
heterogeneous environments, usability etc). Much of the novelty
of Business Transaction Management (app-level coordination)
is context-conceptual.
One aspect is
getting over the equation of first use with all possible future uses.
For example:
How can a protocol which is associated with ACID possibly possess an
interface that is capable of being used for compensations? Of course,
the XA control structure can be so used. Then, treat XA function names
as message names and you have a distributed “interface” with the same
capability … and so on, through all the permutations of two-phase. XAResource used for JCA is a useful
case.
The second
aspect is failure to abstract sufficiently.
People often
confuse the form or the specific context with the essence. The
difficulties that the proponents of WS-T and WS-TXM have with the notion
that all the proposed interoperable outcome protocols (BTP, WS-T BA,
WS-T AT, WS-TXM Acid, LRA and BP) are in fact versions of one underlying
“Ur” protocol (optimizable two-phase outcome
with qualifiers), in my view has its root in this type of failure.
(Parenthetically, there is every reason to have contractual [or
contract-referring] information exchanged in contexts attached to
application exchanges: but that need does not transit to the
coordination protocol).
Concretely, the
biggest conceptual problem (and advance) of BTM standardization, is
seeing compensation as one, special case of negative finalization of a
high-level business transaction, coupled with the need to always have a
positive finalizer (which in that one, special
case will “just” drop its
persistent memory of the business transaction). Put another way: there
is a higher-level abstraction (business transaction), which stands clear
above the database transactions which are now driven by the business
transaction.
Alastair
Green
CTO
Choreology
Ltd
Choreology
Cohesions -- Business Transaction Management software for application
coordination
-----Original
Message-----
From: Mark
Little [mailto:]
Sent: 11 December 2003
03:25
To: Newcomer,
Eric; Guy Pardon; Greg Pavlik
Cc: Robin Cover;
;
Subject: Re: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Apologies for
any backlog of email responses, but I've been flying to XML 2003 today.
Just to second Greg's email - LRA is based on Sagas and similar to Open
Nested transactions.
Mark.
----
Mark
Little,
Chief Architect, Transactions,
Arjuna Technologies
Ltd.
www.arjuna.com
-----
Original Message -----
From:
Newcomer, Eric
To:
Guy
Pardon ; Greg Pavlik
Cc:
Mark Little ; Robin Cover
;
;
Sent:
Wednesday, December 10, 2003 7:58
PM
Subject:
RE: [ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
On the
surface, it does not seem to confict since it requires a
specific implementation of Java classes and operations that
create the transaction system, whereas the WS-CAF approach is to wrap
or abstract the transaction systems (i.e. not to create
one).
-----Original
Message-----
From:
Guy Pardon [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, December 10,
2003 1:32 PM
To:
Greg Pavlik
Cc:
Mark Little; Robin Cover; Newcomer, Eric; ;
Subject: Re: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Hi,
FYI, here is the patent
application's description:
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=pardon.IN.&OS=IN/pardon&RS=IN/pardon
Guy
On woensdag, dec 10, 2003, at
15:07 Europe/Brussels, Greg Pavlik wrote:
Well,
the LRA model as I read it seems to be a relatively close mapping of
sagas, which were as far as I know first described in 1987 by
Garcia-Molina. I think it would be useful if someone took the action
to provide a more detailed breakdown of what exactly is at issue for
the group, because it's not obvious to me after a cursory review of
the CheeTah papers.
Guy
Pardon wrote:
Hi
everyone,
The
VLDB paper is attached. It describes composite systems in the
CheeTah prototype (which served as the provisional application for
the US patent).
Concerning WS-CAF, I think
there may be some overlapping with the LRA model described in the
TXM spec.
It
was not my intention to raise panic and 'warn' anybody, rather just
to point out that the patent exists (which is, I believe, required
on behalf of TC members).
Best,
Guy
On
dinsdag, dec 9, 2003, at 20:27 Europe/Brussels, Mark Little wrote:
Robin, thanks. I think a
description from Guy about how he thinks any patent
relevant to this paper may
conflict with WS-CAF is in order though. Many
companies have been doing
composite applications/transactions for years so
I'd
like to know what aspect of CheeTah may either impact WS-CAF now or
in
the
future. This is certainly the first I've heard of CheeTah so from an
Arjuna perspective it
certainly didn't influence WS-CAF, but maybe Guy's
email
is intended to just warn the TC in its future directions?
Mark.
-----
Original Message -----
From:
"Robin Cover" <>
To:
"Newcomer, Eric" <>
Cc:
"Guy Pardon" <>; <>
Sent:
Tuesday, December 09, 2003 7:08 PM
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Perhaps:
CheeTah: a Lightweight
Transaction Server for
Plug-and-Play Internet Data
Management
-------------------------------------------
Guy
Pardon, Gustavo Alonso.
-------------------------------------------
Abstract:
The
ability to maintain transactional interaction
in a
distributed system has proven to be a key feature
in
information systems. Unfortunately, as technology moves
towards more distribution and
decentralization, it becomes
increasingly difficult to use
existing transactional
tools. In fact, current
solutions are entirely unsuitable
for
what we call composite systems. Composite systems
can
be characterized as a collection of distributed,
autonomous components, linked
in an arbitrary configuration.
In
this paper, we describe CheeTah, a Java based set of
tools
for building composite components capable of
interacting transactionally in
arbitrary, dynamically
changing configurations. We
describe the technology provided,
how
designers would use it to build composite transactional
systems, and examine in detail
the performance of the
resulting solution. Among the
results we have achieved,
the
performance and the simplicity of use are of particular
interest.
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/department/IS/iks/publications/pa2000.html
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/department/IS/iks/publications/files/pa2000.pdf
-----------------------------------------------------
Robin
Cover
XML
Cover Pages
WWW: http://xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter:
http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter.html
On
Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Newcomer, Eric wrote:
Guy,
To
second Mark's email, can you please also send additional information
about
the patent, such as the VLDB paper you mention.
Thanks,
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From:
Guy Pardon [mailto:]
Sent:
Tuesday, December 09, 2003 9:53 AM
To:
Subject: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Hi
all,
As a
TC member it is my duty to report that there exists a US patent (US
patent application 09/682,969
-- finally approved about two months ago)
concerning composite systems
and an additional European application being in
process. This patent is
probably relevant to the CAF specs (and most likely
to
BTP as well).
Basically, the patent is an
extension of the Composite Systems VLDB
paper
we (Gustavo Alonso and I) had at VLDB2000.
Best,
Guy
Dr.
Guy Pardon ( )
Atomikos: Your Partner for
Reliable eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The
information in this email is confidential and only meant for the
addressee(s). The content of
this email is informal and will not be legally
binding for Atomikos.
Dr.
Guy Pardon ( )
Atomikos: Your Partner for
Reliable eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The
information in this email is confidential and only meant for the
addressee(s). The content of this email is informal and will not be
legally binding for Atomikos.
Dr. Guy Pardon
( )
Atomikos: Your
Partner for Reliable eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The
information in this email is confidential and only meant for the
addressee(s). The content of this email is informal and will not be
legally binding for Atomikos.
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