The World Wide Web Consortium on Tuesday agreed to form a working group to draft an industry-wide recommendation on implementing Web services choreography, to enable Web services to better interact with each other for more automated transactions.
The Web Services Choreography Working Group, which will be co-chaired by Oracle"s Martin Chapman and Enigmatec"s Steven Ross-Talbot, at this juncture will consider two choreography proposals submitted to W3C, including Hewlett-Packard"s Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL) and Sun Microsystems" Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI). The WC3 effort is to be built on WSDL 1.2, according to W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly.
But a rival choreography proposal by Microsoft, IBM, and BEA Systems, called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), is not now being considered by W3C because it has not been submitted to W3C and lacks a royalty-free condition of its use, Daly said. This condition, required by W3C, means that authors of the proposal could not collect fees for use of the technology as a W3C recommendation.
"It"s questionable whether we could even use [BPEL4WS]," Daly said. "We"re hoping that the owners of the document will make it available."
She noted that the three companies that authored the document all are active in the W3C.