[graap-wg] Telecon on 3/21

[Karl Czajkowski]

On Mar 21, Toshiyuki Nakata loaded a tape reading:
...
> 1)If you loook at the two layered picture of Agreeement Services and the 
> lower level, Real services (Such as Job submission etc), My 
> understanding is BES has to deal with the Serive layer beneath the 
> Agreement Factory layer.
> 

I am not 100% certain that I understood your comment after this one,
because I want to read it as stating something close to what I think I
have been saying, but as I said at the BES BoF, this "Agreement + job
submission" view is a misunderstanding of WS-Agreement's service
abstraction.  "Job submission" is not the service layer we would
envision beneath the Agreement management layer, because the
submission pattern is exactly what WS-Agreement is meant to address.

Specifically, agreements about "generic execution jobs" or "specific
kinds of job" are what we intended the basic agreement creation
pattern to handle. Creation==submission. It is hard to express this
without using the word agreement in a circular manner, but we took
GRAM/GARA and said, "these are agreements about jobs or reservations"
and tried to generalize it just a bit.  These generalizations, while
important, are not very intuitive for people to grasp; if they were,
the GRAM and GARA systems would probably have started off more
general. ;-)

WS-Agreement, through the GRAAP-WG charter, was scoped from the very
beginning to address the "submission" part in its management model;
our two explicit example use cases were job submission and advance
reservation for jobs!  That's the domain area brought in by the
founding participants.

This is why I frame this as a misunderstanding/public relations
problem.  There are not open questions for how WS-Agreement SHOULD
handle jobs except that we haven't publicized the the answers well
enough. :-)

I am completely in agreement regarding the time sensitivity of this
work.  We need to get a technically sound, well documented standard
out in a short amount of time.  Any two of these three features will
probably not be sufficient...

karl

-- 
Karl Czajkowski
karlcz at univa.com