WS-CAF Meeting in Newcastle

Last week Arjuna Technologies hosted a very productive WS-CAF meeting, co-sponsored by Codeworks, an economic development agency for the North East of England. Codeworks has launched a program with Arjuna specifically for promoting the adoption of Web Services in the North East area together with Arjuna.
WS-CAF members from Arjuna, Choreology, IONA, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems participated in a very productive meeting. We processed more than 100 issues on the WS-Context and WS-CoordinationFramework specifications, and laid out a schedule for progressing both specs toward new drafts.
The next face to face is planned for April 28-29 in New Orleans, held at the end of the next OASIS Symposium.
At the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit last November in Florida, Gartner analysts Charles Abrams and Darryl Plummer called WS-CAF one of the three most important advanced Web services specifcations efforts underway at OASIS. Similarly, OASIS CEO Patrick Gannon highlighted WS-CAF in his presentation at this month’s Web Services on Wall Street event.
The WS-Context member of the WS-CAF family provides a standard definition for a shared context data structure, and defines a context management service. Context in Web services is important especially for composite applications that run potentially across multiple deployment environments and languages.
The WS-Coordination Framework spec defines a software agent with which Web services in a composite can register and thereby participate in one of many protocols. Protocol types include two phase commit, long running actions, business processes, atomic transactions, business activities, business transactions, publish/subscribe, and simple REST style.
When a Web service in a composite registers with a coordinator for a protocol, the Web service becomes a participant in a larger unit of work capable of sharing context and results.
Interdependent services can comprise new and larger applications, and when they do, infrastructure level functionality is required to assure common behavior across multiple implementation platforms. Simple interoperability is sufficient for many applications; but many others implicitly (or explicitly for that matter) require high availability, reliability, security, and transactional behaviors to get the job done right.