Editor's Note: These minutes have not been edited.
Draft Minutes of the Transaction Birds of a Feather
38th IETF, Memphis, April 9, 1997
Reported by: Keith Evans (keith@loc252.tandem.com)
Chair: Keith Evans
1. Introduction
Keith opened the meeting by welcoming everyone and giving a brief
overview of the Transaction BOF. The intent of the meeting was to
socialise and discuss interest in the Internet-Draft Transaction
Internet Protocol (TIP) specification, and ascertain the need for an
Internet standard for transactions.
2. TIP Presentation
Jim Lyon presented an overview and rationale of the TIP specification
(draft-lyon-itp-nodes.01.txt).
3. Discussion
The primary issue which arose was instigated via a letter submitted,
signed by individuals from several companies (this letter is attached
below). The letter states essentially that any Internet transaction
standard should be based upon the CORBA IIOP + OTS protocol, and that a
new protocol (e.g. TIP) is not required. This view was supported by
members from two of the signatory companies present at the meeting.
[Note that one of the signatory companies (Digital) also sent a
representative to the BOF to support the TIP proposal.]
Arguments were made by several people against this position, which may
be summarised as:
- OTS assumes IIOP, and does not support other application
communication protocols (e.g. HTTP), whereas TIP supports any
application protocol, it therefore offers protocol independence. This
is an essential requirement.
- applications using HTTP are not going to use IIOP.
- TIP is very simple (whereas IIOP/OTS is not), and hence is suitable
for many applications where a small footprint is required.
- TIP picks the low-hanging fruit and offers a simple common 2-pc
protocol - it does what's needed simply and efficiently. IIOP/OTS is
overkill.
- the IETF has a bad track record of standardising complex protocols
such as IIOP/OTS.
- IIOP is not an Internet standard and probably never will be.
A question was asked whether TIP solves problems which OTS does not,
and vice-versa? It was answered that TIP is agnostic with respect to
application protocols, whereas OTS assumes IIOP.
Another point was made that OSI TP is also not a solution to this
problem, since it too is complex, and not widely implemented.
The discussion then centered around whether the IETF should develop a
standard transaction protocol at all, regardless of which protocol?
The essence of comments here was that there are a number of
applications developed by the IETF which need atomic transactions, and
a common standard would prevent each application from inventing their
own 2-pc protocol. Such a standard would provide an IETF middleware
building-block. Hence a Working Group on the subject should be formed to
address transactions, given this synergy with other IETF efforts.
It was also stated that there is a general need for transactions on the
internet, and that this problem is not solved today. A counter argument
was made that different organisations will not do 2-pc with each other
because of trust issues. It was noted that this would not be the case
for a large company intranet; nor for cooperating organisations (e.g.
between a publisher and a bookstore, or a travel agency and a hotel
chain).If this was an issue, then an installation can protect
themselves by employing timeouts to abort transactions that have
overstayed their welcome. (This (timeouts) is also the answer to
another question which was raised about deadlock detection.)
A show of hands at the end of the meeting yielded only 2 persons that
thought forming a Working Group to address transactions on the Internet
was a bad idea. There was also a majority sentiment that TIP is a good
starting point for such a group.
Attachment
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Here is the text of the letter submitted at the meeting:
To The Members of the IETF TIP BOF
9 April 1997
We believe in the value of open standards for transaction processing. We
support collaborative efforts to specify standards, implement standards,
and help ensure broad industry adoption of standards.
Fortunately the open systems community has already collaborated on an
Internet-based standard for transaction processing, including a
two-phase commitment protocol.
As part of the Object Management Group (OMG), many companies including
Bull, IBM, ICL, Iona, Novell (Tuxedo), Tandem, Tivoli, Transarc, and Sun
collaborated to define the Object Transaction Service (OTS) which
provides two-phase commitment using TCP/IP with the Internet Inter-ORB
protocol (IIOP). Additionally OTS has been incorportated by JavaSoft in
their JTS.
Standards provide tangible value when products implement them. OTS has
not only been specified, but implemented in products shipping from
several companies, and announced by many others.
The Internet community is best served by a single standard for two-phase
commitment. The goal of IETF is to establish widely-adopted standards
for interoperability. If yet another standard is pushed into the
community, vendors will be faced with the burden of supporting two
standards, and the user community will be forced to manage systems of
limited interoperability or those built on two similar, yet distinct
protocols.
We, the undersigned, recommend to the members of the IETF the following:
1) Those who desire IETF endorsed transaction standards, we recommend
working with the OMG on a submission of OTS and IIOP for IETF
endorsement.
2) Those who are dissatisfied with the current OTS or IIOP
specifications are invited to participate on the next revisions.
Carlos Borgialli, Digital Equipment Corporation
Mark Carges, BEA Systems, Inc.
Carl Cargill, Netscape Communications Corporation
Graeme Dixon, Transarc Corporation
Jeri Edwards, BEA Systems, Inc.
Larry Jacobs, Oracle Corporation
Jeff Mischkinsky, Visigenic Software, Inc.
Goran Olsson, Oracle Corporation
Annrai O'toole, Iona Technologies
Chris Stone, Object Management Group
Tony Storey, International Business Machines Corporation
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