WS-BPEL 2.0 now an OASIS Standard 10 May 2007
Posted by soachief in SOA Standards.add a comment
The long awaited arrival of WS-BPEL 2.0 is finally over. After an almost four year wait WS-BPEL 2.0 is an approved OASIS standard.
Organizations can use WS-BPEL to specify business process behavior and exclusively relies on Web services. It supports two different kinds of processes: executable business processes, which can be executed by a BPEL engine such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager, IBM’s WebSphere Process Server, ActiveBPEL, Apache Ode, and others; and abstract business processes that are not intended to be executed and specify some agreed behavior that parties in a communication scenario can agree upon. Microsoft also supports BPEL, although mostly as an add-on for interoperability reasons. Microsoft already supports BPEL in its ESB product BizTalk Server. Now the company has announced its plans to support BPEL within the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), which is integrated into Windows Vista. BPEL will be supported by a set of WF activities available as BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation. According to Paul Andrew, Windows Workflow Foundation Technical Product Manager at Microsoft,
“the CTP release will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification. The final release of BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation will implement the OASIS BPEL 2.0 standard and is planned for release in Q4 of calendar year 2007.”
WS-BPEL 2.0 is the sucessor to BPEL4WS 1.1, which in turn was created based on IBM’s WSFL and Microsoft’s XLANG. To some degree, WS-BPEL competes with the choreography specification currently being standardized at W3C, the WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description language), currently in candidate recommendation status.
The OASIS WS-BPEL wiki has some information on what is new in version 2.0. More information is also available in the official press release and on the BPEL TC part of the OASIS web site.
WS-POLICY Interoperability using UDDI 9 May 2007
Posted by soachief in SOA Governance, SOA Standards.add a comment
webMethods hosted the first-ever interoperability evaluation event for the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment (WS-Policy) Candidate Recommendation specifications a few weeks ago.
During the event leading products that support the UDDI registry specification for lifecycle governance, the webMethods Infravio X-Registry Platform and the HP SOA Systinet Standard Edition, were used to demonstrate interoperability with the Layer 7 SecureSpan XML Appliance using the WS-Policy specifications.
The development of a standards-based model for governance interoperability between Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) and each policy’s system-of-record represents a significant step towards enabling standards-based federated policy management for the enterprise.
One of the fundamental challenges that service-oriented architecture (SOA) works to address is orchestrating a series of very dynamic interactions between disparate Web services in accordance with enterprise-class standards for Quality-of-Service. WS-Policy helps to achieve this objective by facilitating agreement between producers and consumers of Web services. More specifically, WS-Policy provides a means for describing and communicating the capabilities and requirements of specific Web services in a coherent and reliable manner, ensuring that specific preconditions are fully met within each interaction.
As an underlying component of WS-Policy, the Web Services Policy 1.5 – Attachment specification can be used to bind specific policies to unique services via either WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) or UDDI. In the case of a UDDI registry, it defines how policies can be stored and accessed within an associated repository to deliver optimal performance. Successful testing paves the way for UDDI to be included, along with WSDL, as an acceptable means for policy exchange in the Candidate Recommendation of the specification.
By having the ability to exchange interoperable policies between enforcement points like the Layer 7 SecureSpan appliance and UDDI registries gives organizations a powerful standards-based solution for full lifecycle SOA governance and management.
WS-Transaction approved 9 May 2007
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Web Services Transaction (WS-Transaction) version 1.1 has been approved as an OASIS Standard. WS-Transaction describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Such coordination protocols can be used to support a wide variety of applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed transactions.
The WS-Transaction OASIS Standard comprises three specifications: WS-Coordination; WS-AtomicTransaction; and WS-BusinessActivity. WS-Coordination enables an application service to create the context necessary for propagating an activity to other services. WS-AtomicTransaction defines agreement protocols for short-lived activities having the all-or-nothing property, and WS-BusinessActivity defines protocols for long-running transactions that require compensation-based agreement. Working together, these specifications enable existing transaction processing, workflow, and other systems to hide their proprietary protocols and operate in a heterogeneous environment.
The WS-Transaction OASIS Standard was developed by representatives of Active Endpoints, Adobe Systems, AmberPoint, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, Nortel, Oracle, Red Hat, Ricoh, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO, and others. IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat verified successful usage of WS-Transaction, in accordance with eligibility requirements for all OASIS Standards.
The official announcement can be viewed on the OASIS site here
