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The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) Monday announced that some of its members have begun work on a new specification to handle asynchronous Web services.
The new group, called the OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) Technical Committee, is working on extending the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to address the latency between the request for a resource or service and its actual return. ASAP is applicable for areas as diverse as workflow, business process management, e-commerce, data mining and mobile wireless devices.
Members of the OASIS ASAP technical committee include British Telecommunications plc., Computer Associates International Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., DataPower Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd. The chairman of the committee is Jeff Ricker, principal of technology solutions at IZAR Associates Inc., of Saddle Brook, N.J.
“We dont expect that our standard will be the be-all, end-all, but we instead hope to build a practical, highly useful standard that can be embedded in other existing protocols, such as ebXML [electronic business XML] and others,” Ricker said. “If we learned anything from previous standards battles, its that its key to build a simple, open-source protocol that everyone can use.”
Karl Best, vice president of OASIS, said ASAP members will focus on establishing compatibility between ASAP and the organizations ebXML Message Services standard and the OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging specification.
“Asynchronous communication among Web services is critical to both the simplification of enterprise application integration and the facilitation of next-generation business models,” Gavenraj Sodhi, eTrust product manager at Computer Associates, said in a statement. “CA is actively participating in the enablement of this asynchronous communication by supporting standards efforts and incorporating those standards into our industry-leading Web services management, security, and provisioning solutions.”