Web services have become the integration platform of choice for enterprise
applications. Those applications by the very nature of their enterprise-scale
components can be complex in structure, which is compounded by the need to
share common data or context across business processes supported by those
applications. Those processes may be very long lived, and may contain periods
of inactivity, for example, where constituent services require user
interactions.
In response to these issues, WSCAF (Web Services Composite Application
Framework) was publicly released in July 2003 after almost two years of
effort, and has broad industry support from companies such as Iona, Oracle,
Sun, and a host of others, and is now under the care of an OASIS
standardization effort through the WS-CAF Technical Committee. The WS-CAF
specifications are a suite of protocols designed to provi... (more)
It's a fact: Web services have started to mature. Those emergent standards
that once held so much promise are now actually starting to deliver useful
implementations. With the basic Web services plumbing mastered, we're
starting to see more advanced infrastructure, which enables these
second-generation Web services to focus on complex interactions over the
Internet. This article, the first of a two-part series, covers one such
aspect of the second-generation infrastructure for Web services:
transactions.
Overview
The OASIS Business Transactions Protocol, or BTP, has become the p... (more)
In part 1 of this article (WSJ, Vol. 2, issue 10), you saw how simply BTP
toolkits can support the creation of applications that drive transactional
Web services with consummate ease. This article covers the other side of the
story: how the same technology impacts Web services developers.
In this article, I'll address this aspect and show how BTP can be used to
create transaction-aware Web services and how those services can be consumed
by transactional applications.
Transactionalizing Web Services
To transactionalize a Web service with BTP is something of a misnomer, since
BTP d... (more)
In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications
designed to support business transactions over Web services. BPEL4WS,
WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination together form the bedrock for reliably
choreographing Web services-based applications.
In our previous articles (WSJ, Vol. 3, issues 5 and 6), we introduced
WS-Coordination, a generic coordination framework for Web services, and
showed how the WS-Coordination protocol can be augmented to provide atomic
transactionality for Web services via the WS-Transaction Atomic Transaction
model.
This article looks ... (more)
With the emergence of Web services into the mainstream the developer has to
learn how to architect and build service-oriented systems. While service
orientation isn't a new concept, the rapid convergence of the industry on Web
services technology has brought the concept of service-oriented architectures
(SOA) to the forefront of many developers' minds.
Over the last decade we learned how to construct software systems using
patterns that adhered to the concepts of object orientation. Now, service
orientation requires us to adapt to a new approach to system integration and
applica... (more)