AMID THE DRIVE to achieve industrywide interoperability of Web services, vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are aiming to steer the IT world toward accepting their technologies as standards.

Web services currently are being subjected to a plethora of proposed standards to iron out issues such as business processes, messaging, communications, and security. Most recently IBM, Microsoft, and BEA left Sun out of a proposal for business processes standardization, called BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), which irked Sun officials.

According to at least one analyst, vendor limelight-grabbing over standards is nothing new and has, in fact, proven successful.


"Look, Sun has every right to complain about not being invited to this party, but please don't forget that they started this ball rolling with how they dealt with Java," said Tim Sloane, director of enterprise and Internet infrastructure, at Aberdeen Group, in Boston. "IBM and Microsoft certainly learned from that."

Having vendors lead standards development isn't necessarily bad, as long as the process is opened up to address the needs of the broader IT community of users and suppliers, Sloane said.

At this stage, Web services seem focused on what Microsoft and IBM want, Sloane said, but "we will have to wait to see if they do a good job of eventually balancing this out among the community."

BPEL4WS represents the marriage of two rival standards: IBM's WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) and Microsoft's XLang. An executable language, BPEL4WS is designed to ensure that differing business processes can understand one another in a Web services environment.

At the same time as the BPEL4WS proposal, the three vendors announced two new standards: WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination.

As of mid-August, the joint proposal had not been submitted to a standards organization such as W3C or OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).

Immediately following the announcement of the BPEL4WS plan, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun said it had not been invited to participate in the effort and that its own WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) plan, already submitted to the W3C, may be redundant with BPEL4WS.

"We were not asked to participate [in the BPEL4WS submission]," said Suzy Struble, manager of XML initiatives at Sun.

Full Article: InfoWorld