[wsrp-interfaces] 8/15 Conference call summary

On the call today: Mike Freedman, Rich Thompson, Alejandro Abdelnur, Yossi
Tamari, Carsten Leue, Joe Rudnicki, Charlie Wiecha, Tim Jones, Alan Kropp,
and Shankar Ramaswamy.

Summary:

Charlie asked that we schedule time to talk soon about the property
proposal sent to the lists yesterday.  We decided to try and include
this in either next Tuesdays or Thursdays discussions.  Please read
the proposal and send initial comments to the discussion lists.

The bulk of the meeting discussed interface factoring.  Primary
discussion concerned educating ourselves on impacts to the the consumer
with regards to handling multiple factors.  Carsten provided an overview
indicating that consumers would tend to isolate the impact of factoring
by providing a consumer side uniform interface with which it interacts. 
The implementation of this interface would be a dynamic composition of
the necessary factors supported by the producer.

From this overview we moved into a technical discussion concerning how
a consumer determines what factors or interfaces a producer specifically
supports.  We determined that WSRP/WSIA will have to define WSDL specific
names for either port types, bindings, or ports. Having a constant name
one can look up in the WSDL that represents a factor allows a consumer
to easily determine factors.  We cut the discussion off before defining
which WSDL element(s) we would have to define standard/predefined names
for.

 
Note: After the concall I did some research and had a conversation
with a colleague. I suspect we will want to define standard names for both
bindings and for port types but not ports.  Though JAX-RPC's consumer
API looks like it stops at the port name (doesn't seem to allow you to
[easily] get further WSDL information -- it seems much more appropriate
to fix binding and or port types names within the WSRP namespace. 
In the end this means that JAXRPC consumers will [likely] have to manually
parse the WSDL its beginning to look like they may need to do this anyway
to support static stubs.  The reason I would recommend standard names
for both binding and port types is that we are talking about supporting
factors at both levels.  I.e. the attachments factors is at the bindings
level while the collection of methods within a given interface is at the
port type level.  What do folks think?
From the depths of the technical discussion we moved back to the original
question of what types of factors should we support.  I expressed
a desire that from a WSRP perspective we limit the required factors a Portal
would be required to support. I suggested that from the WSRP perspective
we should just require the full blown protocol making simpler representations
optional.  Alan [?] suggested the opposite.  That if we limit
the factors a Portal be required to support that it be the simpler representation. 
We terminated the conference call suggesting that this topic be further
fleshed out via the e-mail discussion list.

    -Mike-