The co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Web Services Choreography Working Group, has outlined proposals he believes will ensure interoperability between WS-Choreography and the Microsoft Corp and IBM-backed Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS).

Martin Chapman told ComputerWire he believes Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or a set of neutral syntax can bridge WS-Choreography and BPEL4WS.

Chapman said he is eager to avoid a head-on clash with IBM and Microsoft over web services choreography. He and colleagues at employer Oracle Corp, believe perpetuation of two separate choreography standards would damage evolution of web services by confusing and polarizing the industry.

Don Deutsch, Oracle vice president of standards strategy and architecture, said: The whole idea is we want to grow the [web services] pie. But the present scenario is we let the pie atrophy and die, he said.

If IBM and Microsoft don’t participate and don’t bring BPEL4WS [to WS-Choreography], then I want to do complementary work and don’t want to go head on, Chapman told ComputerWire. There’s a lot of complementary work we can do.

The WS-Choreography working group’s charter has factored two existing proposed specifications in to its work – Web Services Architecture and Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) 1.0, authored by Sun Microsystems Inc, SAP AG, BEA Systems Inc and San Mateo, California-based Intalio Inc.

The working group’s earlier, proposed charter had said BPEL4WS would be considered in its work if made available to the W3C by its owners.

The W3C, though, makes specifications available on a Royalty Free (RF) basis and while BPEL4WS co-authors IBM and BEA said they support RF, co-author Microsoft has – despite prodding – remained resolutely tight-lipped on whether it supports making BPEL4WS available under a RF model.

A Microsoft spokesperson repeated the company’s stance yesterday. Microsoft has not announced the licensing arrangement for BPEL4WS, the spokesperson said.

With Microsoft’s position unclear, Chapman and Oracle will present their ideas at the working group’s first meeting, at Oracle’s Redwood Shores on March 13 and 14. The meeting is expected to draw 16 companies, who will set overall direction.

Among Chapman and Oracle’s proposals are layering a set of pre-imposed conditions on top of WSDL that lists the order in which documents are exchanged. There’s a lot we can do in the WSDL space, Chapman said. It’s something we can do to fill in the gaps.

A second option is for WS-Choreography to develop as a neutral model and to lay syntax on top of the specification. Chapman said conversion between the syntax and BPEL4WS would be straightforward.

We will be discussing these ideas, Deutsch said.

Source: Computerwire