Back from Hawaii

Back from Hawaii and seriously jetlagged. Jim has a nice wrap-up of what happened during GGF11.

I think that this GGF meeting was the “quietest” I’ve been. People seem willing to move on beyond the “infrastructure arguments”, adopt WS-RF as a done deal, and concentrate on the high-level services. The OGSA working group has a lot of work to do. At the moment everything seems so abstract and high-level that I doubt it can be of any use to anyone.

The ad-hoc BOF I organised went well. There were around 50 people there despite being a session which was not advertised beforehand, was late in the day (@ 18.00), and it was at the same time as the chairs’ appreciation party (free drinks). The discussion was very interesting. Steven Newhouse presented a strategy of adopting stable Web Services specifications for building the UK Grid infrastructure. More on this soon. People seem to agree with the position that we’ve been advocating through the “no-risk profile” document of building Grid applications using specifications from the WS-I profiles. This meeting was not supposed to be a discussion about the issues that Jim and I have with WS-RF. Unfortunately, towards the end of the meeting the discussion moved there. It was my fault as a chair for not making sure that this didn’t happen. Oh well, I’ll know better next time.

The OGSI WG is no more. We had the last working group meeting and we all agreed to close the group.

My presentation at the DAIS WG went very well. I presented the “Scenarios for Mapping DAIS Concepts” document and then took part in the discussion panel. I think that the document demonstrated how it is possible to meet the DAIS requirements using WS-I only specifications (the approach I supported) or using WS-Context (the approach that I like but, unfortunately, does not fit with our “no-risk” approach since WS-Context is not considered stable yet).

I also had the chance to talk again to many clever people. The University of Virginia folks released their WS-RF.NET implementation. I always like talking to them. There is a lot of background activity going on, lots of politics, lots of discussions.

Apart from work, we had some fun too. Met new people and went out with some old pals. If you get the chance to go to Waikiki, go to “The Lewers Street Jazz Loft” to see the “buddy mak jazz quartet”. They were just great and the atmosphere really cool. The Oahu beaches were great too; I managed to get back some of my Mediterranean dark colour that I have lost after so many years in Newcastle 🙂

When I organise my photos, I’ll post some.