Proceedings

Abstract:

As Web Services and their interactions evolve, a woven, dynamic fabric of services is emerging. Though the interactions may be described using emerging process languages such as WS-BPEL, the run-time infrastructure must also improve to support this new dynamism. Beyond security and reliability, the new fabric requires an overall context management solution and, in many cases, the capability to coordinate and manage composed services and complex transactions. Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) is an emerging solution in this area. This paper will cover the work of one OASIS TC, how it fits into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Recognizing the future infrastructure requirements implied in the many concurrent standards efforts around business process description, choreography and collaboration using Web Services, Sun, Oracle, Arjuna, IONA and Fujitsu released WS-CAF in July 2003. This framework provides a set of Web Services specifications for context propagation (WS-Context), process coordination (WS-CF) and distributed transaction management (WS-TXM). These royalty-free specifications form a critical part of SOA. Other user communities, standards, and specifications can also leverage them (e.g., for composition, choreography, and security).

The next wave of Web Services and SOA-supporting products will concentrate on management, choreography and security. They will likely all also require some or all of the facilities offered by WS-CAF. For example, choreography involves requirements for coordination and management of complex processes; WS-CAF satisfies these requirements. However, in their current work, the WS-BPEL and WS-Choreography specification developers are not explicitly addressing how context, transactions and coordination services are provided but their emerging standards assume these services are available.

This paper describes the current process language landscape and the value WS-CAF adds when these languages are in use.