Jim Webber

In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications designed to support business transactions over Web services. These specifications - BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination - together form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coordination facilities respectively. This article introduces the underlying concepts of Web Services Coordination, and shows how a generic coordination framework can be used to provide the foundations for higher-level business processes. In future articles, we will demonstrate how coordination allows us to move up the Web services stack to encompass WS-Transaction and on to BPEL4WS. Coordination In general terms, coordination is the act of one entity (known as the coordinator) disseminating information to ... (more)

Introducing WS-Transaction Part 1

In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications designed to support business transactions over Web services. These specifications, BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination, together form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coordination facilities respectively. In our previous article (WSJ, Volume 3, issue 5), we introduced WS-Coordination, a generic coordination framework for Web services, and showed how the WS-Coordination protocol can be ... (more)

Introducing WS-Transaction Part II

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)

Demystifying Service-Oriented Architecture

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)

Introducing WS-CAF - More than just transactions

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 ... (more)