The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established a working group to define and establish rules for an area known as Web services choreography, which seeks to map out how Web services interact to form business transactions. Web services is an increasingly popular way to build and link business software.
The W3C hopes that by establishing a standardised language for choreography, businesses will be able to more quickly build complex applications that involve interlinking several Web services. Without a common language for choreography, the world of Web services risks balkanisation, the W3C warned.
"There's this division of labor that's emerging between those who can develop (Web) services and those that can put them together to make an application," said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at Iona Technologies and a member of the W3C's Web Services Architecture committee. "Choreography (is) about getting business analysts to put Web services together to build an application."
But questions about the intentions of some high-profile W3C members--Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems--threaten to derail hopes for an industrywide standard, said analysts and other observers.
Specifically, some W3C members, notably Microsoft, favor a plan that allows the collection of royalties for the use of intellectual property. "The W3C is trying to take a hard stand on royalties and patents," Newcomer said. "Microsoft is trying to move to a royalty-based model for the specification. This stalemate between Microsoft and the W3C is about the patent and royalties question."
The newly chartered Web Services Choreography Working Group has its work cut out for it. While standards organisations including the W3C and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have defined standard specifications for various components of Web services architecture, the means for combining and ordering those processes have yet to be ironed out.
"Some observers predict that if no steps are taken to develop a choreography specification in a vendor-neutral forum, the Web services marketplace may be divided into a number of non-interoperable subnetworks," reads the new working group's charter.
"A vendor-neutral choreography specification which commands consensus and wide support, on the other hand, can make it much easier and cheaper to create composite Web services which integrate services from multiple vendors."
Vendor-neutral, as always in the standards process, is more easily said than done.
Among the many technologies considered relevant to Web services choreography, two have been embraced by the W3C: Hewlett-Packard's Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL, pronounced "whiskle"), and Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI, pronounced "whisky"), submitted by BEA, Intalio, SAP and Sun Microsystems.
Other choreography languages potentially vying for inclusion under the W3C's imprimatur include the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), ebXML's Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), and Microsoft's XLANG.
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