Section 8.1. About the W3C


8.1. About the W3C

Founded 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:


Web Services Choreography Description Language

A work-in-progress of the Web Services Choreography Working Group, WS-CDL is a high-minded declarative language that captures from a global viewpoint the rules of message exchange for multiple web service-based participants.


Web Services Choreography Interface

Written by BEA and others in 2002, WSCI (pronounced "whiskey") is published on the W3C site as a note[*] and is an input to the work of the Web Services Choreography Working Group.

[*] In the W3C, a note is a document that is published for review, and is not a standard.


Web Services Conversation Language

Like WSCI, WSCL is published as a note on the W3C site. Written by Hewlett Packard in 2002, WSCL is not well-known, but its distinctive state-machine approach merits investigation.



    Essential Business Process Modeling
    Essential Business Process Modeling
    ISBN: 0596008430
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 122
    Authors: Michael Havey

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