Apps Messaging

[Pierre Fernique]

Dear App members,

I arrive late in this discussion just the time for me to catch up with 
my mail. I find that there are very interesting technical points but in 
fact the first big question is "do we have to improve Plastic or 
redefine a new standard ?". If we have a consensus on that, we will 
progress. Otherwise...

My point of view:
I have to say that I'm a little bit afraid about the consequences of 
redefining now a new messaging protocol from scratch. Plastic has 
convinced quickly a number of VO developers for adopting it. I would 
re-use Doug's arguments for Cone Search standard promotion: Plastic has 
been in use for 2 years, with dozen of implementations  ;-) I'm pretty 
sure than a redefinition instead of an adaptation will refrain 
developers for going further for a while (at least 1 year and certainly 
more if the consensus is too difficult to reach). I'm not sure that the 
benefit of this new standard for IVOA will be higher than the current 
Plastic one.

I would really prefer to improve current plastic definition to a first 
official release 1.0 (trying to incorporate very interesting things such 
as mtype and ID-ref and removing the java dependancy on the hub).

For low level application interactions that seems to be not possible to 
implement in Plastic, I wonder wether the work on workflow leaded by the 
GWS IVOA working group will not be more adapted.


Regards
Pierre Fernique