Minutes of SWSA Telecon of November 4, 2003
(there are some holes as I was talking and typing often).


Stuart W. , Mike Huhns, Tim Finin, Mark B., Chris

Stuart: wsfl describes a dependency graph - like a make file
something triggers a dependency chain and it proceeds. 

Mark: I'm confused about choreography vs orchestration. Is it 2-agent vs
n-agent?

Stuart - (missed it)

Tim - Describe as a component in an architecture this workflow execution component. - Make this one process under these circumstances. 

Chris - They may not be good at asynch behavior

Mike H.  - Some may be better than others on the web. There could be many versions. 

Chris - What it would mean to have a service run my process. 

Tim - We need architectural reqs for a web service process engine. 

Mike - ws-coord provides a coord service - 3rd party that coords other web
services. Suppose 2 partners want a transaction with a 2 phase commit for xx
protocol - larger for more participants - manage the process - like a 3rd
party workflow engine. (We speculate that BPEL might be for this?)

Chris - Many are in ws-transact, ws-coord are DB people - look at XOpen
protocol. 

Mike: ws-transaction also supports sagas (long duration transaction) as well as
commits... but between a pair of participants. 

Mike: ws-coord is also 2 party - translation of protocols 
(Chris' notion of process mediation) - ack required vs not. 

Mark: do we want to be sitting on top of these the way BPEL does? 
Mike, Tim: Probably yes.

Mike - Orchestration does. The choreography is n=2. Choreography like WSCL
E.g., first log in then use the functionality. If there are several sites
involved, then there is orchestration.

Mark:
Do we want to invite someone involved with BPEL to speak with us?

Mike: We need to get more focused questions first. 

All: Let's read up on BPEL for next week, to understand how we want to
relate to it, how it relates to other architectures.