Under Lisa's tenure as Area Director, I always looked forward to her
reports about activities in the Applications Area. This is my first step
at maintaining that tradition, although I'm not yet sure how often I
will provide reports (perhaps after each IESG formal telechat and after
each IETF meeting). This report covers IETF 77 through the IESG telechat
on May 6, 2010.


1. WORKING GROUP STATUS


ALTO
Application-Layer Traffic Optimization
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/alto/

The group held a successful meeting at IETF 77, which unfortunately I
was unable to attend because I needed to chair another WG session. The
chairs report good progress on the two WG drafts:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-alto-protocol
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-alto-reqs

There is talk of holding a virtual interim meeting to maintain forward
momentum, which I think is a great idea.


CALSIFY
Calendaring and Scheduling Standards Simplification
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/calsify/

No meeting at IETF 77. This group has only one document left to publish:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-calsify-rfc2447bis

It's on my list to complete an AD review of that document next week.
Ideally we will work to close down this WG in the relatively near
future, because we need to make way for new initiatives. :)


CORE
Constrained RESTful Environments
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/core/

The former "6LOWAPP" team was renamed to CORE upon WG formation. The
group held its first meeting at IETF 77, with plenty of discussion about
wire formats (HTTP subset vs. a binary syntax that's HTTP-like) and
underlying transports (UDP only or also TCP?). There is no official
working group document yet, but the group had an April 2010 milestone to
select a WG document as a starting point for work on the Constrained
Application Protocol ("CoAP"). The primary candidate seems to be this one:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-shelby-core-coap

I'll poke the chairs about issuing a consensus call. :)

See also the requirements document:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-shelby-core-coap-req


HTTPSTATE
HTTP State Management Mechanism
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpstate/

Successful meeting at IETF 77. The group is dedicated solely to updating
documentation of HTTP cookies:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpstate-cookie-08

Right before IETF 77, Eran Hammer-Lahav stepped down as co-chair because
of other commitments, leaving only Jeff Hodges as chair. Given the
limited scope of the WG and the great job being done by document editor
Adam Barth, we'll probably stay with one chair unless Jeff asks for help.

BTW this WG had made good use of the issue tracker, and most of the WG
session at IETF 77 was devoted to closing out open issues:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpstate/trac/report/6


IRI
Internationalized Resource Identifiers
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/

As with CORE, the IRI WG held its first WG session at IETF 77. As with
HTTPSTATE, the IRI WG is dedicated to a single document, a revision of
RFC 3987:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-iri-3987bis

Ted Hardie volunteered to get the group off the ground on a temporary
basis, and has now been replaced by the duo of Marc Blanchet and Addison
Phillips (yes, it takes two people to replace Ted!). Expect quite a bit
of activity from Marc, Addison, and the document editors in the near future.


OAUTH
Open Authentication Protocol
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/oauth/

I could write an entire report about the OAuth WG, which I co-chaired
with Blaine Cook before Hannes Tschofenig took over for me. The WG was
chartered about a year ago but held its first WG session at IETF 77, and
during that time the market has changed quite a bit, leading to a desire
for something closer to OAuth 2.0 than the OAuth 1.1 that was originally
envisioned (along with consequent milestone slippage). The IETF 77
session and follow-up discussions have been a bit disorderly, but out of
that seeming chaos has emerged a specification that appears to have
strong buy-in from most of the WG participants:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-02

The group will hold a one-day interim meeting on May 20, 2010, in
Sunnyvale, California, for the purpose of working through open issues
and coming to agreement on the path forward. Details are here:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/oauth/trac/wiki/InterimMeeting


VCARDDAV
vCard and CardDAV
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/vcarddav/

Successful meeting at IETF 77. The current working group items are an
update to the core vCard format, as well as an XML representation of
that format:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardxml

Based on discussions at IETF 77 and shortly thereafter, these documents
seem to be well on the way to being ready for WGLC. It's probably time
for the AD to ping the chairs about that. :)

In addition, draft-ietf-vcarddav-carddav is in the RFC Editor queue,
waiting on advancement of draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev as a normative
reference.


VWRAP
Virtual World Region Agent Protocol
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/vwrap/

VWRAP is the working group formerly known as OGPX (and before that the
MMOX BoF, for those who remember the broader topics discussed at IETF
74). The group held a good meeting at IETF 77. A number of individual
drafts are under consideration, but there are no WG items as yet. I
really need to read through the entire corpus one of these days...


2. WG FORMATION & LIKELY BOFS

"NEWPREP"

We held a successful BoF at IETF 77 about approaches for updating or
replacing Stringprep in application protocols. An updated charter for a
working group has passed IESG internal review and will soon be published
for external review.

Discussion here: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/newprep


"URNBIS"

Because there is interest in holding a BoF at IETF 78 about possible
updates to the core specifications for Uniform Resource Names (URNs), we
have formed a new mailing list:

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/urn

A first cut at a possible charter is here:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn/current/msg00002.html

Join the list for discussion, but remember to post requests for URN
namespace identifiers to the old urn-nid list:

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/urn-nid


3. INDIVIDUAL DRAFTS

I'm watching the following documents:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-desruisseaux-ischedule (this one is a
bit farther out on my schedule, but I will review it during May)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-giralt-schac-ns (authors pinged about a
revised I-D)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hammer-hostmeta (I'll complete an AD
review next week)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rosen-urn-nena (author pinged about a
revised I-D)

Also watching http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-oiwa-http-mutualauth
informally -- I met with the authors at IETF 77 and hope to provide them
with more structured feedback in the next few weeks.


4. MY DRAFTS

Jeff Hodges and I are working on a draft about "Representation and
Verification of Application Server Identity in Certificates Used with
Transport Layer Security", which we hope will serve as a set of best
practices for application protocols. We submitted an updated version on
April 30 and are actively seeking feedback from application developers,
certification authorities, and service providers.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-saintandre-tls-server-id-check

I'm also pushing to complete work on two documents for the XMPP WG,
which was under Apps in its first instantiation (2002-2004) and is now
under RAI. The XMPP WG has milestones to send rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis
to the IESG in August, and once those are done I'll have even more time
for my AD responsibilities.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis


5. IESG ACTIVITIES

Now I know why area directors are so busy -- they need to review and
comment on 500+ pages of Internet-Drafts every two weeks. Since joining
the IESG at IETF 77, I have lodged DISCUSSes on the following I-Ds (and
probably a few others I've forgotten):

draft-ietf-mediactrl-sip-control-framework-11
draft-ietf-mediactrl-ivr-control-package-08
draft-ietf-mediactrl-mixer-control-package-11
draft-ietf-sipcore-info-events-07
draft-haberman-rpsl-reachable-test-03
draft-ietf-sipping-config-framework-17
draft-ietf-netmod-yang-12
draft-ietf-keyprov-symmetrickeyformat-08
draft-ietf-isms-dtls-tm-12
draft-josefsson-kerberos5-starttls-08
draft-ietf-keyprov-pskc-05
draft-ietf-keyprov-dskpp-10
draft-nottingham-http-link-header-09

Do let me know if you think I'm being too tough on I-D authors. ;)


6. UPCOMING EVENTS

As mentioned, the OAuth WG will hold a one-day interim meeting in the
Bay Area on May 20.

I will be attending the IESG retreat in New York City on May 23+24.

Planning has started for IETF 78 July 25-30, 2010, in Maastricht, the
Netherlands. Working Group chairs, send in your meeting requests before
June 14:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/cgi-bin/wg/wg_session_requester.cgi

If you want to schedule a BoF, please contact me or Alexey as soon as
possible. The deadline is June 1. Instructions are here:

http://www.ietf.org/iesg/bof-procedures.html


7. CONTACT & COMMUNICATION

In my humble opinion, communication is a key to success (maybe that's
why I've worked on instant messaging protocols all these years). Before
IETF 77 I attempted to have one-on-one phone conversations with chairs
of all the working groups I advise, and I plan to reach out to those
folks again in the next few weeks. However, if you have any questions or
concerns or ideas for improvement, please feel free to contact me via
email, IM, or phone -- my contact information is here:

https://stpeter.im/index.php/contact/


I think that's it for now!

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/