Interoperability Minutes 2008-02-20

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Full minutes: http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Interoperability_Minutes_2008-02-20

Contents

OpenAjax Alliance Interoperability Committee meeting minutes 2008-02-20

Attendees

  • Jon Ferraiolo, IBM
  • Stewart Nickolas, IBM
  • Ted Thibodeau, OpenLink SW
  • Bertrand Le Roy, Microsoft
  • Adam Peller, IBM

Original Agenda

Minutes

Revised text for Issue 5

Jon: Fairly drastic rewrite. Attempts to take into account discussion from our last phone call plus some good points passed to me privately by Yehuda Katz, who emphasized the need to establish clear conformance requirements. Therefore, the title has changed from "best practices" to "conformance requirements". Any feedback?

Jon: I actually found the example of String.prototype.contains within an Ajax library and it seems like a real-life example where different toolkits might extend at the same point with different rules.

Bertrand: We have a real example with startsWith and endsWith. Prototype defined the same APIs later. Signature is roughly the same. Not a big deal from an interoperability perspective. But here you could use an actual example from industry.

Jon: OK

(discussing the relocation conformance requirement)

Bertrand: This is a pretty dramatic change. Just have to accept that we won't be able to achieve conformance. Too late for us to do that.

Ted: Purpose of relocation isn't for existing deployments of MS Ajax but for new deployments that want to add MS Ajax to prevent conflict.

Bertrand: What about component developers?

Jon: Components would also need to be relocatable. I recognize what a big impact this would be for you.

Bertrand: Guess we have to accept that we are not bleeding edge. Our obligations to our customers prevent us from changing.

Jon: I understand the practical issues with major software companies who have existing companies and backwards compatibility issues. But the mission of OpenAjax it to provide industry interoperability and ability to integrate multiple products, and addressing JavaScript collisions is a big part of achieving the ability to integrate.

Tangent on OpenAjax Conformance

Jon: Regarding ability to claim conformance, we need to talk about that to finish up the details and it will be a topic for our F2F. My feeling is that we need to have a full conformance level where a toolkit supports all of our conformance requirements, but we also need to have an a la carte feature where toolkits can claim that they support A, B, and C but have not yet supported D. We want to encourage toolkits to embrace the notion of interoperability and ability to integrate with other toolkits, but practically there are going to be cases like MS Ajax where it isn't feasible for an existing toolkit to make all of the best practices that we want the industry to adopt.

Ted: We could take an approach like MySQL which has levels

Bertrand: Yes, there needs to be an incentive for the industry to participate and declare its globals

Jon: Back to the Registry, how about the 3 MUSTs that I have in the conformance requirements?

Ted: Depends on whether we have levels

Bertrand: #3 (must document) is a MUST

Ted: First two can become layers to force levels of conformance

Jon: I think it needs to be simple, such as either Full conformance or a la carte.

Ted: Better if we have Basic, Advanced and Full. Basic just includes documentation

Jon: I wonder why we can't just have a basic and full to keep it simpler.

Ted: Ok, don't feel that strongly.

Ted: First tier is minimal, just document. Advanced would be registry. Full would suppot the requirements.

Jon: If we did a Basic level, it would have to be at least documentation *and* registering with the Registry. It isn't asking much to tell us which globals should be approved and which should be acknowledged.

Jon: Should conformance be stated for each spec individually or for everything at OpenAjax?

Ted: Probably at a spec level.

Bertrand: How about a checklist for each conformance requirement that shows users what they can expect?

Ted: Adds complexity.

Jon: But we could provide a template snippet of HTML to insert into the conformance documentation.

Ted: Could have a link back to the conformance declaration. I still want to see a summary statement so that people will have a quick and simple statement and not have to look at a long table.

Jon: UUAB and WCAG at W3C have levels but I'm not sure if either has caught on and I doubt if the industry has done much to support levels beyond the lowest one.

Ted: The problem there is that lack of industry attention to accessibility. Levels worked well with ODBC. That experience is relevant to what we are doing.

Jon: The Mktg WG owns the definition of conformance. Need to activate them.

Ted: Need to market this within the whole participants group.

Jon: Maybe we need a mailing list called conformance@openajax.org for general discussion? I'll set that up.

Back to Registry Issue 5

Jon: Further comments?

Bertrand: If you have a mechanism to relocate globals, it should be mentioned in Registry entry.

Jon: We have an arbitrary comment field.

Ted/Bertrand: The document should talk about relocation more fundamentally

Jon: Any objections to the 3 conformance requirements?

(none)

Next steps with Registry

Jon: In past, we talked about handing over to general member review, then public review, then start formal approval of submissions. Sound OK?

(no objections)

Hub 1.1

Jon: FYI. As is stated in the minutes, the spec is posted, includes strawman APIs, and open source is posted, will be updated with a new check-in shortly. I would like to being discussion of Hub 1.1 as the principal topic of this WG starting at next phone call in 2 weeks.

Agenda for F2F

Jon: Any comments?

(everyone: looks ok)

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