[I sent this earlier today to XML-DEV - apologies for duplicate posting for those subscribed to both lists. I believe that my inquiry has direct bearing on ebXML in cases in which, for example, 2 organizations may be using messaging standards, with one being ebMS and the other not being ebMS] I have a theory on the subject of "competing specifications" that I'd like to present, in hopes of getting some good feedback. I'm thinking mostly in terms of Web Services specifications - or specifications that are not intended strictly for Web Services by nature, but have applicability to Web Services. By "competing", I mean 2 or more specifications that cover the same "functional area" (e.g. reliable messaging, context, transactions, etc.) and most/all of the same general actions that are applicable to that functional area (e.g. for reliable messaging, "notify a sender reliable messaging processor that a message was received out-of-order"). Some examples of such overlapping specifications (both "open" and emerging) would be: * Reliable Messaging: OASIS WS-Reliability, WS-ReliableMessaging * Transaction/Coordination: WS-Transaction (WS-AT and WS-BA), OASIS WS-CAF * Identity Management: Liberty Alliance, OASIS SAML 2.0 My theory: Competing specifications are not necessarily a bad thing, as long as: (1) The cost to an organization to interoperate with another organization (or another system within the organization) that implements a competing specification in a given functional area is either minimal or 0, and (2) The risk is either minimal or 0 One case in which the risk would (in my opinion) be more than minimal, and possibly quite high, would be in reliable messaging: WS-Reliability, for example, considers a message ID to be a unique combination of [a Group ID + a Sequence ID]; if an organization that implemented WS-Reliability were, for example, to interoperate with an organization that implemented a reliable messaging standard that did not group message IDs together (but instead used unique message IDs for each message), a middle process would be required to pack/unpack groups of messages between the installations as required. If this "translation" were to be faulty (due to a software or configuration bug), the whole messaging interaction could be - pardon the pun - unreliable. Thoughts? Comments? -- Kind Regards, Joseph Chiusano Associate Booz | Allen | Hamilton The ebxml-dev list is sponsored by OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/>
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