Minutes of the Forth OGSI-WG Teleconference 28/Aug/2002 @ 15:00-16:30 GMT Attendees: Tim Banks Karl Czajkowski Steve Graham Fred Maciel Andreas Savva David Snelling John Tollefsrud Steve Tuecke Peter Vanderbilt Shell? 1) Minutes of 21 Aug 2002 Teleconference were approved as published to the list. 2) Goals and Strategy for Face to Face meeting next week. - 13:00 Wednesday Sept. 4th to 15:00 Friday Sept. 6th. - The plan is that there will be no fee required (depending on numbers). - Wireless network will be available. - Agenda will be based on existing list plus Bugzilla items (post issues ASAP). - We will consider crafting text for Handles, but straw-men before hand would help. - Bring your own hard copy of the GSS. 3) ServiceType Inheritance Discussion As the WSDL group will meet in two weeks time, we covered the issues surrounding serviceType inheritance so that Steve Tuecke will know where we all stand (roughly). The issue was not dealt with in detail last time because it was late in the day, but the concerns as reported by S. Graham centered around the question: Why not just cut and paste portTypes or use include files? The GridService community's argument is roughly: - Inheritance in the interface expresses the designer's intent. - It provides support for discovery, "I want another one like this one." - The server side implementation need not be OO, see CORBA approach to C. - However, this may have been one of the acceptance problems with CORBA. - Knowing that the semantics are inherited helps client tooling. - Overloading was raised as an issue, but is already present without inheritance. Action: Steve Tuecke to write to WDSL working group asking that this item be placed early on the agenda so people have time to think about it. Our serviceType inheritance means the transitive closure of both the interfaces and semantics of all portTypes in all the serviceTypes of the hierarchy, i.e the union. Note that it is like a set, i.e. no duplicated portTypes even if they appear in several constituent serviceTypes. If they ask what we plan to do if they don't include serviceType inheritance, our position is that we will do it ourselves by extension. We will note that so will others, as it will be a very useful extension. We should stress the standards issue as part of the reason for doing it. If they decide not to do it, we should press them for clear a justification to pass back to the Grid community. Item for next week's agenda: Discuss the formal language aspects on what we mean by serviceType inheritance. This should help with the WSDL meeting as well as clarify our own thinking. 4) Technical Discussion: Registration portType Background: The Registration portType provides a method for a client (in this case usually a GridService) to notify the GS implementing this portType that it exists and has a handle. This portType will be common on any GS acting as a registry, but may also be implemented by other services. What is done with the Handle and any other information about the registering GS is up to the implementation. [Note: I use the term 'registry' below for a GS that implements the Registration portType. It may not have all or any of the functions we normally associate with a registry, but this will aid the discussion.] The questions are then: a) Do we bind, in the specification, the service data describing the content of the registry to this portType? b) If we do bind it, is there at least one (minoccurs=1) mechanism/format for describing the content on the registry? c) If yes, is that format a WS-Inspection document? It was clear from the discussion that a "document only" approach presented a problem for very a large registry with millions of entries. Some form of operational interface would be needed for this type of registry. However, it was also felt important to bind the concept of registry content to the Registration portType. There were several arguments in favor of requiring at least one mechanism/format for this registry content, but since in the end a client may not be authorized to get the content. Although many GSs will publish WS-Inspection documents, other formants/mechanisms would need to be supported. There were also questions about the status of WSIL, from Sun in particular. There has been no public forum process applied to WSIL yet and no statement as to the IPR terms to be applied to it. There was general agreement that some statement was needed as to what the terms were going to be before we tied the spec to this standard. There was also a strong feeling that the terms should be "royalty free", but it was acknowledged that GGF only required RAND at present. A brief discussion rejected the idea of attempting to define a query portType to complement the Registration portType. Decision: Yes to (a) in the form of a SDE (working name "RegistryContentNames") containing the service data names of SDEs containing registry content. Minoccurs=0 was agreed for (b). And by default, a WS-Inspection document is therefore not required. Issues raised that should be carried forward: - Track the IPR status of WSIL. - Should WS-Inspection document (or other formats) be explicitly noted in the spec? - The minoccurs=1 instances in the spec as a whole should be revisited in light of authorization issues etc. 5) Next Meeting: No teleconference on Sept 4th. The next teleconference will therefore be: Time: Wednesday, September 11th 08:00-09:30 US Pacific (GMT - 7) 09:00-10:30 US Mountain (GMT - 6) 10:00-11:30 US Central (GMT - 5) 11:00-12:30 US Eastern (GMT - 4) 15:00-16:30 GMT 16:00-17:30 UK (GMT + 1) 17:00-18:30 Central Europe (GMT + 2) 00:00-01:30 Japan Place: Phone: Phone number: 1-484-630-5376 Pass code: 93031 IRC: DALnet #ogsi 6) Open Issues: Time #16 Absolute or relative termination time #13 Use Measured TimeStamps #22 What if SDE lifetime attributes are not specified? #23 Expressing "forever" in SDE lifetime attributes Factory #05 Factory extensibility #19 Reduce Factory::CreateService output parameters Not yet numbered: - Discuss the formal language aspects of serviceType inheritance. - Track the IPR status of WSIL. - Should WS-Inspection document (or other formats) be explicitly noted in the spec? - The minoccurs=1 instances in the spec as a whole should be revisited in light of authorization issues etc.