The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, better known as OASIS, announced Wednesday a new initiative to define a set of protocols that will standardize Web service consensus protocols that are used in SOAs (service oriented architectures).
The initiative brings in some heavyweight vendors in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) and integration markets, including Microsoft Corp., SAP AG, Oracle Corp., Tibco, Software Inc., webMethods Inc., IBM, Iona Technologies plc, Hitachi Ltd., and Composite Software Inc.
As part of the new WS-TX (Web Services Transaction Technical Committee), the companies will work with OASIS to define specifications that will help software customers better utilize Web services to create composite applications.
The WS-TX will focus initially on three specifications that have been contributed to the effort: WS-Coordination (Web Services Coordination), WS-AtomicTransaction, and WS-BusinessActivity (Business Activity Framework).
“The interoperability of the contributed specifications has already been demonstrated by several vendors,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO at Iona Technologies and the proposed co-chair of the WS-TX technical committee, in a statement. “Our objective will be to receive the broadest possible industry feedback and use that input to refine and build on what exists today.”
The group will begin by hammering out the WS-Coordination specification then move to the additional two WS specs, distilling the common features of each and adding on where necessary, with the goal of supporting additional transaction models, officials said.
