Re: [grobj] Referral definition and its purpose?

[Sheng Jiang <[e-mail]>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Moore [mailto:[e-mail]] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 8:27 PM
> To: Sheng Jiang
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [grobj] Referral definition and its purpose?
> 
> On 5/18/10 5:01 AM, Sheng Jiang wrote: 
> 
> 	Hi, all,
> 	
> 	We are now working on an referral PS draft, targeting 
> to submit end of May
> 	or the beginning of June. We'd like to discuss the 
> relevant contents/topic
> 	publicly in the mail list during our writing. Comments 
> or contributions are
> 	more than welcome.
> 	
> 	The first target is to understand what is referral and 
> its purpose. There
> 	may be different understanding, our goal here is to 
> find a common definition
> 	for our PS draft. The following is my understanding and 
> what's in the draft
> 	now.
> 	
> 	In abstract: The purpose of a referral is to enable a 
> given entity in a
> 	multiparty Internet application to pass information to 
> another party. It
> 	enables a communication initiator to aware relevant 
> information of its
> 	destination entity before launching the communication.
> 	
> 	In the introduction: A frequently occurring situation 
> is that one entity A
> 	connected to the Internet (or to some private network 
> using the Internet
> 	protocol suite) needs to inform another entity B how to 
> reach either A
> 	itself or some third-party entity C. This is known as a 
> referral.
> 	
> 	Does everyone can agree on this Referral definition and 
> its purpose? Only if
> 	consensus can reach here, our next discussion for 
> referral scenarios can
> 	make sense.
> 	
> 
> I would define the scope as somewhat broader than that.  I 
> think it's quite reasonable to want to make referrals across 
> application boundaries.  If one application provides a 
> service that's useful to another application, I think it's 
> reasonable to pass a referral object from one application to 
> another.    To say this another way, I think that these days 
> the boundary between one application and another is rather arbitrary.

Hi, Keith,

Fully agree. The approach we are discussing is application independent. So, natually, the solution
we may produce will have the ability to traverse application boundaries. My ideal model is the
referral will happen in transport layer to serve all applications.
 
> I also think that part of the purpose for standardizing 
> referral objects is to facilitate referrals between one 
> application and another.  If all referrals were within the 
> same application, there would be less need to standardize the 
> object, as each application could develop its own.

The same with above. We are going to standardize application independent referral, both referral
objects and referral behaviors. However, the WG, if we gets approved, only aims to understand the
referral problems and requirements. Only after we finish ps and requirements, if we find that
defining referral objects and referral behaviors is needed, we may recharter to work on it.
 
> Another purpose in standardizing referral objects is to allow 
> standardized APIs to manipulate referral objects and to allow 
> those APIs to be reusable across multiple applications.

Abosolutely.

> However IETF doesn't usually standardize APIs.  So this by 
> itself might be seen as a weak justification in IETF circles.

We can find out only after we complete the study in new WG.

Cheers,

Sheng