Section 18.3. Competing Specifications


18.3. Competing Specifications

No discussion of the Web services platform would be complete without acknowledging the presence of many competing specifications. This section will summarize some of the competing spaces and their prognoses over time. The objective is not to provide a detailed technical analysis or comparison, but rather to point out competing specifications and indicate their relationships to other specifications of the Web services stack.

ebXML [ebXML] is a suite of standards for conducting electronic business using XML over the Internet. It includes support for XML messaging, transaction, interface definitions, service registries, and security. ebXML has the support of UN/CEFACT [CEFACT] and has been submitted to ISO [ISO]. Some industry domain-specific standards have also endorsed ebXML, but many of these bodies have also endorsed the Web service platform discussed in this book. ebXML moves forward in OASIS, as do many of the specifications discussed in this book, including WS-Security and WSBPEL.

The Liberty Alliance [LIB] defines a suite of specifications for federated identity management and security. Unlike the authors of most of the specifications discussed in this book, many of the companies in the Liberty Alliance are consumers of information processing technology (American Express and NTT DoCoMo, among others). IBM joined the alliance in October 2004. Liberty focuses on support for companies that want to federate user registries to support single sign-on for end users interacting with multiple Web sites. In addition to single sign-on, Liberty also provides support for sharing property information (preferences) across corporate boundaries. Liberty also defines some base technology (messaging, interface definition) to support the federation of identity systems. Liberty competes with the WS-Security specifications, especially WS-Trust and Federation.

OASIS has workgroups focusing on specifications that compete with some of the functions in the Web services platform documented in this book:

  • Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) [WSCAF] defines a model and service for composing multiple Web services in composite, transactional solutions. WS-CAF is similar to capabilities provided by WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransactions, and WS-BusinessAgreement.

  • WS-Reliability [WSREL] is very similar to the reliable messaging protocol discussed in this book.

Web Service Choreography Description Language (WSCDL) 1.0 [WSCDL] is a specification that is in a similar area to BPEL. The focus is different, with more emphasis on a global model that composes a set of services and less emphasis on supporting the definition of specific Web services based business processes. BPEL, on the other hand, focuses almost exclusively on providing an XML language for completely defining concrete implementation business processes.

Competition between standards, specifications, and ideas is not uncommon. To some extent, this is healthy for the industry, allowing competing ideas and approaches to emerge and prove themselves. This has happened in many other areas in the IT industry, such as communication protocols (TCP/IP, ISO OSI, SNA), database models (SQL/Relational, Object/ODMG), and languages (Java, C++, Smalltalk). However, the industry is seeing incremental movement toward consolidation and integration of the Web service standards. Expect a dominant platform to emerge, supported by all of the major vendors. This platform will complement the human-centric HTML/HTTP Internet functions with support for application to application interactions and integration.



    Web Services Platform Architecture(c) SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BP[.  .. ] More
    Web Services Platform Architecture(c) SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BP[. .. ] More
    ISBN: N/A
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 176

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