8.1. About the W3CFounded by Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Web) in 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (http://w3c.org) has grown into a commanding community of more than 350 organizations; it has authored many of the most important technical specifications in web and enterprise computing, including those pertaining to HTML, XML, and web services. The web services contribution alone constitutes a huge body of work, with standards for the two basic technologiesSimple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)as well as the so-called "WS-*" family, which enhances the web services stack with support for reliability (WS-Reliability), security (WS-Security), and choreography (WS-Choreography). What about BPM? As we have shown throughout this book, contemporary BPM has embraced the web services concept and anointed this concept as its key enabling technology. No one can write a business process without understanding and knowing how to write in WSDL. The W3C is thus relevant to BPM as the conceiver of its some of its fundamental underpinnings. But with choreography, the W3C actively joins the fray as a BPM thought leader. As demonstrated in greater detail later in this chapter, BPM is concerned with interacting processes; most BPM languages are built to describe the design of one of those processes, whereas a choreography language aims to capture the global process interaction model. Three W3C choreography languages are examined in this chapter:
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