[Sis-ams] Updated AMS White Book

[Scott Burleigh]

Hi.  I've finished updating the AMS reference implementation at JPL to 
conform to the revised AMS spec; it needs a lot more testing, but at 
this point I think both it and the spec are stable enough to justify 
advancing AMS to "Proposed Standard" (white book) status within SIS.  
Bob, is there any formal procedure we need to work through to make this 
happen?  The target date for publication (whatever that means) of the 
AMS white book is December 19, according to our charter.

In the course of revising the implementation I found (as usual) a few 
points in the spec that needed re-revising.  In particular, the whole 
message space resynchronization procedure needed to be rethought once 
again (and it is now finally implemented, in conformance with the 
re-revised spec, though not yet tested).  So I've posted two new PDF 
documents to the AMS-WG CWE: a new clean copy of the White Book, 
replacing the one that was there before, and a "markup" copy that shows 
what changed in the transition from the initial version to this new one.

The next milestone identified in the AMS-WG charter would be publication 
of a Red Book in June.  I'm hoping that the spec is actually pretty 
close to final now and that the application development and testing we 
do over the next five months will make it reasonable to advance AMS to 
the status of Draft Standard.  Time will tell.

One other bit of news: the AMS reference implementation is now ported to 
Interix (Windows Services for Unix) as well and seems to work okay on 
Windows XP Professional machines with Interix installed.  This may 
simplify some of the development I want to do, such as building LabView 
wrappers for AMS functions.

Scott