[dfdl-wg] Draft document just under the wire for "official" commentary at GGF15

Mike Beckerle beckerle at us.ibm.com
Fri Aug 26 17:26:39 CDT 2005


See 
http://forge.gridforum.org/docman2/ViewCategory.php?group_id=113&category_id=803&language_id=1&sort0=ddate&dir0=1

The document is "DFDL Proposal" and is posted in word and pdf formats. If 
you use the above URL it should be the top 2 documents on your display.

We made the official deadline which means I can really needle people to 
study this document and comment on it on or before GGF15.

A couple of notes: My group at IBM produced this draft. While we tried to 
fold in the viewpoints of others at IBM that we have been working with 
over the past few months, I cannot represent that this document reflects 
any overall consolidated "IBM opinion" on DFDL at this time. There hasn't 
been time for the rounds of IBM-internal review that would require. Rather 
this is  my group's take on things. It reflects our best shot at how to 
combine the concepts of the OMG TD model and its attributes with the rest 
of the DFDL concepts. We updated the scoping proposal to fix some 
ambiguities left over from the F2F last may, and there's a section on 
layering which only starts to tell the story about this powerful 
capability, but is a good start at it. There's a middle section which just 
gets started at the agenda of explaining all the subtlety of exactly how 
delimiting and tagging work, and how lengths and positions are determined 
and so forth. 

You'll see lots of TBDs and rationale discussion in here still. My goal is 
that by or at GGF15 we resolve many of these so these rationale blocks can 
move down into the appendices or into separate documents, allowing us to 
focus on the meat of specifying the core behavior more thoroughly.

In the appendix which contains the rep-properties detail you'll see lots 
of conflicts. E.g., we have byteOrder=bigEndian/littleEndian AND we have 
bigEndian=true/false.  This is intentional and is the remnants of joining 
forces with the OMG Type-descriptor model. We need to decide on these 
conflicts i.e., for each one, which way do we want to go.  There are quite 
a few such conflicts to be resolved. 

Our prototype implementation does not implement exactly what is described 
in this draft, though it is quite close. The differences are fairly 
insignificant. 

I recommend grabbing the MSWord version, and inserting lots of comment 
blocks as you read it using the comments feature. It is a big document 
though (50 pages), and different parts of it are more accessible than 
others, so do what you will. 

Mike Beckerle
Architect, Scalable Computing
IBM Software Group
Information Integration Solutions
Westborough, MA
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