One door closes and another one opens

Update 1/24: see also Mark Little’s post to InfoQ, and the previous interview with Stefan Tilkov for background.
Last week at the WS-TX TC meeting in Hursley the TC voted unanimously to approve the current drafts of WS-C, WS-AT, and WS-BA to progress toward OASIS standards.
This is great news – a good result of a little more than a year’s committee work, which is actually pretty fast for a standards group.
I would particularly like to highlight the contributions of my co-chair, Ian Robinson, the TC secretary, Paul Knight, and the editors of the specifications. Many TC members also made significant contributions along the way – thanks! This has really been a great TC.
I actually started down this path almost 7 years ago, while working to submit SOAP 1.1. We started mapping the Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP) (which I also worked on) to SOAP (insert your own joke here 😉 but quickly encountered a showstopper – the lack of persistent sessions in HTTP.
TIP, like most distributed TP standards, relies upon the use of persistent sessions to maintain shared transaction context. And distributed TP standards (including TIP and OTS/JTS) interpret the loss of the communications session that maintains the shared context as an error requiring rollback.
For browsers a lost session is no big deal (just click again on the link) but if you are doing distributed transactions you could easily end up with a lot of rollbacks and not getting much work done.
(This is, by the way, one of the reasons Mark Little and I created the WS-Context spec.)
Anyway it has definitely been a long haul, and worth raising a glass…

The WS-TX TC at the King’s Head, Hursley
(full photo)
A fitting place to end our technical work, I suppose, since Hursley is a worldwide center for IBM’s transaction processing products, which still dominate the market. And they have a real fancy old English manor house, too.

“Hursley House”
(full photo)
(Our meeting room was on the ground floor, facing the lawn, just inside the lefthand column group.)
Next week I start my new adventure in the world of software standards as co-chair of the new OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. IONA is hosting the EEG kickoff meeting next Tuesday (Jan 30) at our Dublin office.
(No, I’m sorry, we don’t have an old Irish manor house, but we do lead the CORBA market ! 😉