Web Services in Serious Jeopardy
David Berlind,
ZD Net,
Mar 06, 2003
This somewhat technical article launches readers into the world of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, but most often pronounced "bee-pell") and the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI, pronounced "whiskey). These protocols are used to choreograph the interaction of web services - for example, if a transactions fails somewhere, then you want all of the various services involved to revert to the original pre-transaction state. As such they are an essential part of the whole web services infrastructure, but they are also, as the author describes it, the stage of a showdown between IBM and Microsoft on one side, and the W3C (and just about everybody else) on the other. At issue is royalties: Microsoft, in particular, does not want to surrender the right to charge royalties for BPEL4WS. But the W3C - and just about everybody involved with web services - is not willing to accept a royalty-based standard. Anyhow, this article is a lucid introduction to issues and the dispute, explained with a pretty good analogy, and thus suitable for the average (but interested) reader.
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