Standards Overview

Our position on standards: realism.

Standards formation is one way that the software industry debates future directions in a relatively vendor-neutral way. Plus, customers, end users, and trade consortia find standards-based software attractive.

Even though Choreology is a small company, we have been involved in standards activities since our beginning. That’s because we’re trying to create a new category called Business Transaction Management, and much of our thinking in developing that category has occurred in standards bodies - starting with the OASIS BTP Technical Committee and more recently in, for example, the OASIS WS-BPEL and the WS- Coordination and Transaction workshop process.

WS-* (or, “WS-Star” or “Web Service everything”) stands for a new stack of middleware standards being promulgated by a variety of software vendors and standards organizations.

These standards address or cover much of the same ground as covered in the past by previous middleware standardization efforts like CORBA and DCE. The heavy use of XML is of course novel, and unlike prior iterations, WS-* focuses almost exclusively on interoperability and does not attempt to address API or language binding issues (with the interesting exception of WS-BPEL, which is a language spec, not an interoperability spec). WS-* therefore tends to supplement the highly successful J2EE standards which, in the Java world, focus heavily on achieving portability.

Real interoperability takes a long time. The main value of WS-* for end users is in bringing together the two largest forces in the industry, Microsoft and IBM.

At the same time, competitive specifications produced by companies like Oracle and Sun also claim the WS label.

We in Choreology don’t have a camp. We are not Oracle-ites or IBM-ites. As Lord Palmerston said of states, we “do not have friends, we have interests”.

We are interested in viable standards and in convergence where possible. We are particularly interested in viable convergence for Business Transaction Management. We are also interested in any work that eases deployment of Web Services in the plural distributed computing environments that exist and will persist.

We categorize standards efforts into:

• Those we're heavily involved in:
  • Business Transaction Management (BTM): BTP, WS-C+T, WS-CAF and GGF TM-RG
• Those we are actively involved in:
  • Business Process Management (BPM): WS-BPEL and to some extent BPMN
  • Business Conversation Management (BCM): WS-Choreography
• Those we watch e.g. WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Reliability

In line with our overall strategy we can see, and would favor, efforts in the standards arena to define:

• Business Transaction Processing (BTP) : the combination of BTM, BPM and BCM,; and
• genuinely interoperable Business Protocols – as a concrete use of the BTP idea.

Another way to classify some of these efforts:

• Retread of existing technology: WS-RM
• Combination and codification of existing approaches: WS-BPEL
• Fresh thinking about unresolved problems: BTM

Our standards involvement reflects our strategy, which is to take off from our BTM product and move to Business Transaction Processing.