Jim Webber

In July 2003 a consortium of Web services vendors released the Web services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) to the community. WS-CAF is comprised of three specifications that together provide a means of reliably composing individual Web services into larger aggregate applications. The cornerstone of this suite is the management of stateful interactions between Web services that is the domain of the WS-Context specification. WS-CAF was subsequently submitted to OASIS and an effort to standardize the framework is currently underway. In January 2004 a group of industry and academic practitioners from the Grid community released (the first parts of) the Web Services Resource Framework (WS-RF) specifications. WS-RF will support stateful interactions between consume... (more)

Why WSDL Is Not Yet Another Object IDL

There has been much debate lately on what exactly WSDL's purpose is, and much of that debate has focused on whether WSDL is an interface definition language (IDL), or whether WSDL is better used to specify message-level contracts (without any associated operational semantics). In this article we present an argument that dealing with WSDL as a message-level contract description language is... (more)

The Smart Money's on OASIS BTP

By now we've all heard a fair bit about Web services, a lot of hype and few hints that there's something really innovative going on here. Trudge round any developer conference and you'll hear the chatter of eager developers wanting to roll together a host of disparate Web services into the most fantastic and powerful applications the enterprise has ever seen. Composing enterprise applicat... (more)

Introducing WS-Coordination

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 ... (more)

Inroducing BPEL4WS 1.0

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 (see WSJ, Vol. 3, issues 5-7), form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coord... (more)