Oasis is working on standard technology to enable Web
services to function in situations in which business process
communications have a delayed response, as opposed to the quick
responses normally associated with Web services.
ASAP (asynchronous service access protocol) is intended to
provide for a simple extension to Soap that enables generic
asynchronous Web services or long-running Web services.
The technology would be used when an answer to a request might
take from minutes to months to arrive.
The service being invoked might be automated, a manual task that
a person performs, or a mixture of the two.
ASAP is intended to be particularly suited for B2B or
intra-organisational service requests.
A demonstration of ASAP, along with a companion specification,
Wf-XML (Workflow XML), is planned for the Brainstorm Group’s
Business Process Management Conference in San Francisco on 23
June.
ASAP is in a committee draft form at the Oasis ASAP committee,
with plans calling for it to be finalised by the end of the year,
according to the committee's chairman, Keith Swenson.
Swenson has been working on ASAP for a number of years.
ASAP presents a standards-based alternative to
publish-and-subscribe messaging, he said. Wf-XML, meanwhile, is
being worked on by the Workflow Management Coalition.
Wf-XML provides for a lifecycle of services, or a services
“factory”, according to Swenson. A factory represents a specific
service such as a loan application.
An analyst, though, was highly critical of ASAP.
“ASAP is a new standard that offers new capabilities for
asynchrony,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.
“I can think of at least a half-dozen specifications trying to
accomplish what they are [trying to do with ASAP].” He cited, among
others, WS-Eventing, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WSBPEL [Web Services
Business Process Execution Language].
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld