Monday, February 28, 2005

Why WSDM isn't ready for primetime (yet)

So, the WS-DM TC are happy with their Committee Draft document and are now trying to get it adopted as an OASIS specification. STOP. DON'T DO IT! MOVE SLOWLY AWAY FROM THAT DOCUMENT!

As I've just explained in our vote to OASIS, we're happy with TC CD status, but the unfortunately the specification has dependencies on non-finalised and proprietary specifications, including WS-N and WS-Addressing. What's worse is that WS-N uses a different version of WS-Addressing than the WSDM specs do!

It's premature to elevate the spec. to the level of OASIS international specification. In particular WS-Addressing is currently being worked on and looks like the final version when it finally emerges will be significantly different from its various antecedent proprietary versions and won't be available until after July 2005. In particular, already we've seen that ReferenceProperties has been removed from the current draft of WS-Addressing in W3C, so this will have an immediate affect on WSDM. So you'd download the specification to implement it and find that it's pretty much broken!

I think to adopt this as a standard will set a dangerous precedent for OASIS. Specifications that attain the OASIS international specification level ought to be stable and have a certain amount of rigor and interop testing.

Let's hope the voting members see sense and send this back to the TC to correct.

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