[drinks] WG poll on transport protocol

["Alexander Mayrhofer" <alexander.mayrhofer at nic.at>]

All,

The chairs would like to seek some input from the list on the practical
options the WG now needs to confront on what is the most appropriate,
but
more importantly,  what is also most deployable transport protocol for
DRINKS.

The protocol design team has made good progress towards a first draft 
of the DRINKS protocol, and the issue of which transport protocol to
proceed with was discussed during several conference calls.

The chairs wish to formally reach concensus on how the group
should proceed regarding that protocol transport issue.

Discussions during our face to face meetings have indicated that
a SOAP/XML based approach would fit most of the various vendors
and service providers that would potentially deploy a DRINKS protocol. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP

The design team been advised that it might also be useful to look at
REST-like
protocols as REST design principles for WEB protocols overcome many of
the
known limitations and interoperability problems associated with SOAP.

There are arguments that a RESTful Web Services approach for a DRINKS
protocol from a provisioning would not only be appropriate for a Client
2
Server but also Server 2 Server approaches as well. 

It should be understood that REST is not a protocol but a series of
design
principals. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

The central counter argument is that SOAP is the most universally
deployed
data exchange mechanism out there and that anecdotal evidence indicates
that
SOAP is the predominant form of transport mechanism in current use among
SSP's and will be for the foreseeable future.

The design team has currently concluded that it would be beneficial to
seperate the definition of the data object from the underlying 
transport protocol to permit defining more than one transport, if 
necessary.

In order to document WG consensus on this issue the chairs would like to
poll the WG on the following questions:

It is very important that as many members of the list participate in
this
poll as possible. Please provide feedback to each question as fully as
possible.

General questions regarding deployed transport protocols:

1. How many folks have SOAP implementations in their OSS-BSS systems for
the
kinds of protocols DRINKS is looking out? 

2. How many folks have a REST-like implementations in their OSS-BSS
systems
for the kinds of protocols DRINKS is looking out?

3. In general what data model or protocol properties do your
organizations
ultimately lean towards - SOAP vs. REST? Other?

4. What are the specific applications that SSP are looking for DRINKS to
enable .. LNP?..MMS/SMS interoperability, SIP interconnection etc ??  

Questions to reach WG concensus on:

3. Do you agree that the design team should define the architecture / 
data model independently from the definition of a potential 
transport protocol? (as far as possible)

4. Given the goal to define the data model outside its transport, do you
prefer the group to 
	A. Define a SOAP based transport protocol and if anyone is
interested they can work on a RESTful version? 
	B. The WG try and do both? 

  
Please provide feedback before July 8th, if possible.

Thanks,

Richard & Alex