I would like to request opinions on how to map (if ever there would be need) GDMO/CMIP models to WSDL-XML/SOAP-XML or FWS-ASN.1/SOAP-ASN.1? Also, I have few questions with respect to some of the XML<-->ASN.1 and FWS efforts:
Currently there is vast amount of GDMO/ASN.1 specifications (M.3100,G.774 etc). So my thought is that GDMO will continue to be around. I can send a figure that I drew to map GDMO to WSDL(+schema) to any one interested (please mail me seperately). But behind the plethora of information available in X.693,x.694,x.FWS I find it difficult to come to some elementary understanding of how GDMO/CMIP to fGDMO(fast GDMO) will look like. Your help will be greatly appreciated. a comment on the GDMO part of the above Mr Thorpe [Thorpe] Please note, however, that GDMO is considered obsolete since the introduction of Information Object Classes to ASN.1. See additional comments below. Are there any tools to convert legacy GDMO models to FWS (or XML). Also, I believe all newer ITU-T specs, such as for FTTP/PON, are being developed using UML. Is this correct? If so how is FWS (ASN.1 schema notation) going to fit with UML approah? Overall, I wish there are more figures in X.fws and X.694 that depict the architecture and use cases before the translation rules or information items. The two figures in X.694(the draft X.694, not the final doc) do help - and Particularly, figure 1 in X.694 - there is lot of conversion from XML document to ASN.1 purely for the purpose of encoding. It seems to me that this is too much of processing by the device - probably will make sense if the final encoded data is to be transferred on a bandwidth limited connection. But would it make sense for HPC to bother with this conversion? - one response I got from Mr Thorpe: [Thorpe]Please note that the conversion from XSD to ASN.1 is not necessarily intended to be done on the device. A tool (such as one created by OSS Nokalva) can read the XSD schema once (the compiler) and generate control information that just knows how to encode/decode the messages in either XML or BER, or PER etc. with the same static control information. There is no need for the device to do the X.694 translation on the fly. Next, in figure 2 - first sending schema using ASN.1 (+encoding) followed by sending instance document using ASN.1(+encoding) - seems little odd. In legacy WSDL/SOAP , isn't the receiver expected to feed the schema to the XML parser? In either case, both figures seem to imply that the server and client applications still use XML (DOM/SAXP) - it is only for the purpose of using ASN.1's efficient encoders - BER/PER etc that the conversion from XML to ASN.1 and vice versa is done. Is my understanding correct? Also, would XER (XML Encoding for ASN.1) then not be relavent for FWS? I did get some response from Mr Thorpe and Mr Leg for this: [slegg] XER is relevant for FWS implementations that use an ASN.1 compiler rather than DOM or SAX. If there is a need to interwork with a client or server that is not enabled for FWS then an XER encoder can be used to produce the XML representation of a document. [Thorpe] WS would use one of the binary encoding rules of ASN.1, but a Web Service should fall back to use of XML if its peer does not understand the compact binary FWS encodings. Finally - ASN.1 schema notation for XML - I think it looks quite verbose and difficult to read compared to XML schema. Do you think my view is reflective of some others ? If so, any comments?
