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Concluded WG Simple Workflow Access Protocol (swap)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Simple Workflow Access Protocol
Acronym swap
Area Applications Area (app)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-swap-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chair Surendra Reddy

Final Charter for Working Group

A standard protocol is needed to integrate work providers, asynchronous
services, across the intranet/internet and provide for their
interaction. The integration and interactions consist of control and
monitoring of the work.  Control means creating the work, setting up the
work, starting the work, stopping the work, being informed of
exceptions, being informed of the completion of the work and getting the
results of the work  Monitoring means checking on the current status of
the work and getting a history of the execution of the work. The
protocol should be light weight and easy to implement, so that a variety
of devices and situations can be covered.

The Simple Workflow Access Protocol is a proposed way to solve this
problem through use of HTTP protocol, and by transferring structured
information encoded in XML.  A new set of HTTP methods is defined, as
well as the information to be supplied and the information returned in
XML, that accomplish the control of generic asynchronous services.  This
has applicability to workflow because a workflow is itself an
asynchronous service, and it also has the need to be able to call
asynchronous services outside of itself.

This BOF will introduce a strawman draft of the SWAP protocol and
discuss the goals behind the work.  It will attempt to gauge whether
the goals are appropriate for IETF, and if so, whether there is
interest within IETF in forming a working group to develop and
standardize such a protocol.