Desktop Agent Bridging Discussion group 25th Jan 2023

[kriswest]

Group overview

Discussion group for developing proposals for producing bridges between FDC3 implementations (aka Desktop Agents), allowing applications running on one Desktop Agent, to integrate with FDC3 applications running on a second Desktop Agent for the same user.

The interop between applications running on different Desktop Agents aka Platforms would ideally cover

• Channels
• Raising and resolving Intents
• Launching Applications

Current proposal document

Relevant issue tags

• Current open issues that relate to the above concepts with the label:
  
• The original issue is now a github discussion where content can be added and this issue discussed:
  Desktop Agent Bridging Discussion group #544

Meeting Date

Wednesday 25 Jan 2023 - 9am EST / 2pm GMT

WebEx info

• Meeting link: https://finos.webex.com/finos/j.php?MTID=m55d4aa79e148c948bf53163690e74fee
• Meeting number: 2558 920 8729

More ways to join

• Join by video system:
  • Dial 25589208729@finos.webex.com
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• Join by phone
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• Access code: 2558 920 8729

Meeting notices

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Agenda

• Convene & roll call, review meeting notices (5mins)
• Review action items from previous meeting (5mins)
  • Desktop Agent Bridging Discussion group 23rd Nov 2022 #862
• Update from the Backplane project (15min)
  • Getting quickly productive with what we offer
    • Artifacts available to download.
    • Quick start.
  • Brief description of demo attached in Readme.
  • Roadmap
    • Issues, asking for help.
• Implementation simplicity vs. security for Private Channel message exchanges (10mins)
• Defining the message exchange (JSONSchema vs. OpenAPI vs. AsyncAPI) (10mins)
• Q&A / proposal feedback discussion & AOB (15mins)
• Adjourn

Minutes

• PrivateChannel message exchanges

  • Improved pereamble added to this section explaining approach
  • An explanation of the message routing flow regarding broadcasts and event messages was provided
  • No comments or objections to this approach were raised - no a preference for a simpler scheme which relies on DAs to provide security
    • Group to review and provide feedback/differ opinions

• @kriswest addressed @robmoffat's feedback on the use of OpenAPI vs JSON Schemas vs AsyncAPI

  • Debate the available options and relevant drawbacks/limitations.
  • No one present had experience with AsyncAPI
  • @Vivek-NatWest - Used JSON Schema previously, acknowledges that it isn't the most human readable format, but is useful for generating types in many languages (including TypeScript and.Net)
    • It would be useful for moving the BackPlane project forward - especially for future contributions
  • @kriswest - message payload definitions in OpenAPI/AsyncAPI are (generally JSONSchema, but with the added ability to define endpoints and link to the message exchanges, generate documentation and generate client/server stubs.
    • We will proceed with using JSON Schema to define the messages used in the proposal - future changes should not be too complicated, including upgrade to AsyncAPI definitions
    • NWM BackPlane team to investigate the using AsyncAPI
  • @Vivek-NatWest mentioned FINOS Financial Objects project - what do they use to generate documentation
    • @kriswest older stuff is hand edited - there maybe be more recent things I haven't seen.
    • @Julia-Ritter - Ask the FO maintainers what are they using to automatically generate documentation from JSON Schema or other formats.

• Update from Backplane project

  • @Vivek-NatWest provided an update on the project
    • Focused on improving adoptions by:
      • creating a quickstart guide
      • added sample Hello World example with Finsemble integration
      • lots of work done in the backend - automation of releases, population of release assets, nukpg, etc
    • explained the workflow of the Hello World example in BP
    • Issues created to which they are seeking help to implement https://github.com/finos/backplane/issues
    • @kriswest - Building a testing harness to the Backplane, similar to a conformance testing framework, would provide a way to develop and test without a Desktop Agent being updated to support bridging (which is hard to do until work is complete)
      • suggested adding this item as a issue/milestone to the BP project

• Alex (Citi) - Asked about discovery service and examples of it provided in the repository.

  • @Vivek-NatWest - simple config based discovery provided for multi-machine - intended to be replaced with something more elaborate by firms deploying backplane
  • for single machine use simply no discovery service is needed (hosted on localhost)

Action Items

• @kriswest @tpina - Start creating JSON Schema documents for message exchanges (to be used to generate documentation and objects (TypeScript and .NET)
• NWM - Add new milestone or issue to BackPlane project for a Testing Framework
• NWM - Improve documentation Hello World example with details of both single and multiple machine use-case
• NWM - Investigate usability of asyncAPI
• @Julia-Ritter - Ask the FO maintainers what are they using to automatically generate documentation from JSON Schema or other formats

Untracked attendees

Full name	Affiliation	GitHub username

[tpina]

Tiago Pina / Finsemble

[Julia-Ritter]

Julia / FINOS

[timjenkel]

Tim / Wellington

[kriswest]

Kris West / Finsemble 🚀

[manish-nwm]

Manish / NWM

[mattjamieson]

👋

[Aaron-Haines]

Aaron / NWM 😺

[mistryvinay]

Vinay Mistry / Symphony

[WatsonCIQ]

Chris Watson / Finsemble 👋

[Vivek-NatWest]

Vivek / NWM