Subject: CIW Minutes

From: "Jack Sanders" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 93 14:27:11 EST

Minutes of the CPI-C Implementers' Workshop (CIW), March 16-18, 1993

----- Preliminaries

The second meeting of the CPI-C Implementers' Workshop was held
March 16-18, 1993, in Raleigh, NC.  Jack Sanders, CIW Chair, conducted
the meeting.

Thirty-four persons representing 14 companies attended.  The list
of attendees is available upon request.  The companies represented are
listed below.

    TEXAS INSTRUMENTS               DATA CONNECTION CORPORATION
    SYSTEMS STRATEGIES, INC.        TRANSARC CORPORATION
    BULL                            AMDAHL CORPORATION
    SIEMENS                         OPEN CONNECT SYSTEMS
    WALL DATA, INC.                 ORACLE CORPORATION
    IBM CORPORATION                 EICON TECHNOLOGY
    ATTACHMATE                      BOEING CORPORATION

----- Meeting Summary

The procedures, technical plan, infrastructure, and editor's guidelines
were reviewed.  No objections were raised.  M. R. Wiggins (IBM), Manager
of Distributed Systems Architecture, described the contractual agreement
needed between CIW members and IBM to govern the contribution of
materials to the CIW.  Copies of the agreement will be mailed to CIW
members.

Productive SIG working meetings were held on the topics listed below.
A brief summary of each SIG working meeting is included.  A full account
of each SIG meeting will be distributed to the SIG via E-mail.  The
secondary return codes work was discussed in an informal working group.

  Full Duplex
    The Full-Duplex SIG reached consensus on full duplex conversations
    and expedited data support for APPC.  (Approved Direction was
    subsequently granted by the CIW.)  For the mapping to OSI TP,
    some work pertaining to the interaction between the Shared Control
    and Commit Functional Units remains to be done. Approved Direction
    for the CPI-C FDX mapping to OSI TP will be requested by the 6/93
    CIW meeting.

  Non-blocking
    A contribution draft based on a conversation-specific wait facility
    was discussed and largely agreed to during the SIG working meeting.
    Asynchronous notification was also recognized as a requirement
    but can be optionally supported by the implementations.  A revised
    draft, including support of asynchronous notification, will soon be
    distributed for review in order to achieve an interim status change
    to Approved Direction (AD).

  Extensions for OSI TP
    The OSI TP SIG reviewed the proposal for enhancements to CPI-C to
    provide support for an OSI TP protocol stack. Several minor additions
    were made to the proposal, which was subsequently granted Approved
    Direction status by the CIW.  All details will be worked out, and
    exact replacement text will be proposed for review for Approved Pages
    status prior to the June meeting.

  Directory
    The directory SIG reviewed the contribution on CPI-C use of the
    DCE directory that was distributed at the December CIW.  The
    specific limitations of the DCE cell directory were discussed
    (e.g., incomplete support of the X.500 specification), and
    the remainder of the working session was spent defining the
    details of the contribution that would be applicable to any
    distributed directory.  The SIG agreed to request Approved Direction
    (subsequently granted by the CIW) and to work towards production of
    an Approved-Pages-level document for approval at the June meeting.

  Security
    An initial proposal for CPI-C Level 2 security enhancements
    was presented (available as file ciw/sig/sec/sec-pres-393.ps).
    Almost all discussion dealt with determining the level of
    information on the underlying LU 6.2 architecture changes needed
    for consensus on the CPI-C changes.  For AD, the
    general viewpoint was that block diagrams and stylized flows
    were necessary and sufficient.  Current plans are to request
    AD on a formal proposal at the June CIW.

  Conformance for CPI-C Level 2
    The Conformance SIG reviewed a high level proposal for a required
    CPI-C 2.0 base support and optional towers. It was agreed that all
    calls must be implemented and that the optional calls would be
    allowed to return a "function_not_supported" return call. In
    addition, work will be done on an "extract_local_options" call. A
    detailed proposal will be available via the anonymous FTP shortly.

  Language bindings
    Any restrictions imposed by a particular programming language
    will be documented.  The use of non-blocking calls was identified
    as requiring investigation.  No additional language bindings
    were identified as requirements at this time.

  Framework
    The framework SIG discussed the document structure of the CPI-C
    specification, the proposal being to include a non-protocol-specific
    explanation of transaction processing, descriptions of the APPC and
    OSI TP models, a conformance section, support for both CPI-RR and
    TX APIs to the transaction manager, and a description of directory
    objects and their use.

Two presentations by implementers of CPI-C 1.2 were very well received.
  Stuart Flower of Data Connection Corporation presented "Upgrading from
CPI-C 1.1 to CPI-C 1.2."  He described the 2500-LOC upgrade to CPI-C 1.2
of DCL's SNAP-IX, a packaged UNIX SNA product, focussing on the
modifications to CPI-C call processing and to the underlying APPC
implementation necessary to support the CPI-C 1.2 accept multiple and
non-blocking enhancements.
  Bill Greene and Kamal Khan of IBM presented "NS/DOS Implementation of
CPI-C 1.2 and Non-Blocking Extensions."  They provided details of the
implementation within NS/DOS, an SNA platform for the DOS/Windows
environment, of CPI-C extensions for queue-level non-blocking.
  Thanks to Stuart, Bill, and Kamal for their excellent presentations.
Suggestions and volunteers for implementer or user presentations are
hereby solicited for the June meeting.

At the concluding plenary session the CIw took the following action:

  A Conformance SIG was established.

  Scope-of-work statements for the established SIGs were approved.

  Approved Direction was granted by the CIW for the work items below,
  based on the contributed documents with modifications agreed to in
  the SIG working meetings.

    - FDX conversations and expedited data for APPC
    - Extensions for OSI TP
    - Directory

A question was raised regarding availability of documentation of the LU
6.2 architecture required for support of proposed CPI-C extensions,
specifically third-party security support.  The consensus was that the
CIW might grant Approved Direction status for CPI-C extensions based on a
high-level description (flows and block diagrams) of the LU 6.2
architecture, but that Approved Pages would not be granted without the
additional architecture details necessary to fully understand the
underlying support.  The CIW Chair will explore the availability of the
security architecture with IBM.

----- Documentation

The following documents were distributed at the meeting:

  Common Programming Interface Communications Specification (the CPI-C
    1.2 document), hardcopy and softcopy.  This document is now available
    from IBM Publications, document number SC31-6180-00.
  Full Duplex and Expedited Data Support in LU 6.2, a preliminary version
    of the full duplex chapter of the LU 6.2 Reference: Peer Protocols
  CPI-C Implementers' Workshop Procedures Manual
    This document will be placed in the document library by Friday,
    March 26, 1993.
  CPI-C Implementers' Workshop Technical Plan
    This document will be placed in the document library by Friday,
    March 26, 1993.

Additional distributed information included the Editor's Guidelines
the Infrastructure presentations and SIG-related materials.

----- Upcoming Meeting Notices

The next meeting of the CIW will be held June 9 - 11, 1993 in Raleigh,
NC.  The agenda will be posted at a later date.  The following items will
be included in the meeting's technical objectives:

  Approved Direction status for

    - FDX conversations for OSI TP
    - Security
    - Secondary return codes
    - Conformance for CPI-C Level 2

  Approved Pages status for

    - Extensions for OSI TP
    - Directory
    - Non-blocking (assuming AD approval between meetings)

Subsequent 1993 Meetings

  September 8 - 10, TBD
  December 7 - 9, Raleigh, NC

-----
Any corrections or additions?

Jack Sanders, CIW Chair
[email-masked]