Co-ordination. Transaction. Execution

By Alun Williams

Posted on 9 Aug 2002 at 17:07

IBM and Microsoft push to further automate Web services.

The two computing giants have agreed to work together on how to create and connect business processes in a Web services environment. They are to publish three new specifications: WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction and a Business Process Execution Language for Web Services. Together, the specs are intended to help control and validate the flow of multiple Web services across different platforms or devices.

The first two specs concern the handling of transactions during the execution of Web services. Those familiar with databases will be aware of the concept of undoing particular stages in an operation - transactions - and being able to 'rollback' to a consistent state. The WS-Coordination specification will help developers control systems that cover multiple Web services. WS-Transaction, by contrast, will allow the automated monitoring of the success or failure of specific activities within a particular Web service.

The third element of the agreement - BPEL4WS for short - is another XML-based language that 'orchestrates' a process flow. The 'Business Process Execution Language for Web Services' replaces existing IBM and Microsoft efforts in this area, WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) and XLANG respectively.

In terms of developers getting their hands dirty with the BPEL4WS, the tool to use - for those following Microsoft's implementation - will be BizTalk Server, which includes a Visual Studio.Net toolkit.

Given that the specifications still have to be submitted to a - yet to be decided - standards body, a Business Manager at Microsoft advised us not to expect an implementation of the specification until the middle of next year, with the next major version of BizTalk Server.

An example quoted by Microsoft involves a travel agency automating its business processes. Using the new specifications the agency could automatically procure airline, hotel and car reservations following the submission (electronically) of a travel itinerary by a customer. Should one of the automated reservations fail to complete, the system could automatically rollback and gracefully undo any transactions.

The new standards follow in the footsteps of previous collaborations between IBM and Microsoft (among others). These include UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), which acts as a form of yellow pages for listing Web services and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), which formalises the description of Web services to help automated processing. WS-Sec, another new IBM and Microsoft collaboration, deals with the framework for defining the security of Web services. This has been submitted to the OASIS standards body.

A third company backing the agreement - one which has previously worked with Sun Microsystems in this area - was BEA, which produces middleware for enterprise-scale systems.

You can find the details of the specs on the Bea Web site. Microsoft and IBM will be carrying the same info online from Monday. Due to broken embargoes on the story, the official announcement has been brought forward, ahead of Web site updates.