Few months ago Simon Laws (IBM UK), Sastry Malladi (Oracle), and I started an effort to write a GGF informational document about how several of the concepts defined by GGF‘s Data Access and Integration (DAIS) working group could be mapped to different Web Services technologies. The approaches considered were the use of WS-I only specifications, WS-I specs plus WS-Context, and WS-RF. The document “Scenarios for Mapping DAIS Concepts” is now available on the GGF grid forge site.

Working with Simon and Sastry was really great. Each one of us “supported” a different approach for the purposes of writing the document. Although I “represented” the WS-I only approach, I’ve been always sympathetic to the use of WS-Context since I believe it fits well with the concepts of service-orientation and the Web Services model. Of course, I am not keen on the WS-RF approach 🙂 Despite the differences in our approaches, collaborating with these guys was very enjoyable. Simon and Sastry are very clever and they were always keen to discuss and consider ideas, unlike so many others in the community I have interacted. If nothing else, I think this document is an excellent example of how people with different ideas can work together.

One of the questions that emerged from the work on that document, was how session-based interactions could be modelled using WS-RF. I just posted a related question to the WS-RF mailing list and I am now waiting for people’s answers.