Jim Webber

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)

Web Services Infrastructure

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)

Web Services Infrastructure, part II

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)

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)