TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

WS-Star Starts to Shine - WS-TX Submission to OASIS

Yesterday saw the public announcement of a new WS-TX Technical Committee at OASIS where Arjuna Technologies, BEA Systems, Hitachi, IBM, IONA Technologies and Microsoft will be submitting the Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination), Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction), and Business Activity Framework (WS-BusinessActivity) specifications.

As CBDI describes in an article about the submission, this represents another of the WS-* jigsaw pieces falling in to place, and is a further example of the continued coalescence of the WS-* architecture.

Abstract: The acronym WS-STAR (or WS-*) is widely used to refer to the set of protocols required to enable secure, reliable, asynchronous transactions to be conducted without creating dependencies on a common messaging middleware or transaction processor. In other words WS-STAR represents a baseline for pretty much any normal commercial transaction. WS-Security has been around for some time, whilst the WS-RX (Reliable Exchange) Technical Committee (TC) was formed earlier this year. The announcement this week of the OASIS Web Services Transaction Technical Committee WS-TX TC sees the final piece of the WS-STAR jigsaw put into place.

[ CBDI - WS-Star Starts to Shine ]

The CBDI article points out the maturity and quality of the submitted specificitions as a result of them going through the WS-* Workshop Process.

Today, implementations of WS-STAR are already available to early adopters, and interoperability workshops have already been completed by the vendors. Although the TC has only just been formed, any critical flaws in the specification should have been identified by now. Going forward the standards process should be one of refinement, and adding to the specification such as documenting additional use cases, rather than reengineering the protocols.

[ CBDI - WS-Star Starts to Shine ]

See you in Cupertino for the initial TC meeting in November.