Open Grid Forum: Data Format Description Language Working Group

Weekly Working Group Conference Call
16:00 GMT, 28 May 2008

Attendees
Mike Beckerle (Oco)
Ian Parkinson (IBM)
Alan Powell (IBM)

1. Next specification drafts

Mike and Alan have independently made small changes to the current specification draft, and there are many changes to be made following last week's face-to-face meeting in Hursley. Alan will merge his changes with Mike's changes to form draft 32, and will also produce a 'point release' of this draft having removed all of the Microsoft Word comments and change annotations.

This point release will be used as a basis for draft 33, which will contain changes from the face-to-face meeting. Mike and Alan will divide the work necessary to achieve this among the team; though the meeting covered some of these items:

Alan will make 'simple' changes from the WTX list of issues
Alan will document speculative parsing, and add a new section covering selectors
We will ask Steve to produce necessary changes for variable markup
The meeting recapped the conclusions regarding forward and backward references - arbitrary forward and backward references are allowed during unparse, but only arbitrary backward references are allowed on parse. Limited forward references will be allowed on parse, but no definition of the limit has yet been made. Alan will write this up.
Mike will author an example showing the comination of choice and valueCalc. While thinking about this example, he has concluded that discriminators will need to be evaluated during unparse, as well as parse. He will discuss this during the next working group call.
Mike will also author a new section in response to comments from Sandy Gao and Suman Kalia, explicitly connecting syntax with DFDL semantics.

Meeting closed, 16:45 GMT

Ian Parkinson
WebSphere ESB Development
Mail Point 211, Hursley Park, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, UK

Unless stated otherwise above:
IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598.
Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU