The World Wide Web Consortium yesterday agreed to form a working
group to draft an industry-wide recommendation on implementing Web
services choreography, to improve interaction between Web services
for more automated transactions.
The Web Services Choreography Working Group, which will be
co-chaired by Oracle's Martin Chapman and Enigmatec's Steven
Ross-Talbot, will consider two choreography proposals submitted to
W3C - Hewlett-Packard's Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL)
and Sun Microsystems' Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI).
The WC3 effort is to be built on WSDL 1.2, said W3C spokeswoman
Janet Daly.
However, W3C will not now consider a rival choreography proposal by
Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems, called Business Process Execution
Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), because it has not been
submitted to W3C and lacks a royalty-free condition of its use.
This condition, required by W3C, means that authors of the proposal
could not collect fees for use of the technology as a W3C
recommendation.
"It's questionable whether we could even use BPEL4WS," Daly said.
"We're hoping that the owners of the document will make it
available."
The three companies that authored the document all are active in
the W3C.
IBM and BEA have pledged a royalty-free stance on BPEL4WS, but
Microsoft has not made any public statement. IBM director of Web
services technology Bob Sutor said last week that BPEL4WS would be
submitted to a standards body within one to two months.
The W3C choreography working group will have a two-year charter to
develop its recommendation. "We'd be happy to have any feedback
into this working group," Daly said.
The charter states: "Some observers predict that if no steps are
taken to develop a choreography specification in a vendor-neutral
forum, the Web services marketplace may be divided into a number of
non-interoperable sub-networks. A vendor-neutral choreography
specification which commands consensus and wide support, on the
other hand, can make it much easier and cheaper to create composite
Web services which integrate services from multiple vendors."
Deliverables of the working group include a requirements document
for choreography, usage scenarios, specifications of choreography
languages, and an XML Schema as well as a test suite.
The multitude of choreography specifications for Web services
prompted Oracle last year to ask the W3C to consider forming a
committee to ponder choreography.