Microsoft & .NET.NETWeb Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) Specifications Released to the Public

Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) Specifications Released to the Public

Developer.com content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.





Wednesday, June 26, 2002, BEA, Intalio, SAP, and SUN announced the publication of a new Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI).

WSCI describes the flow of messages exchanged by a Web service in a particular process, and also describes the collective message exchange among interacting Web services, providing a global view of a complex process involving multiple Web services. Today’s service description languages are adequate for simple information retrieval, such as a stock quote, but they do not provide the rich behavioral detail that describes the role the service plays as part of a larger, more comprehensive collaboration. An example of this new method is the exchange between a customer and a travel agent. Now customers can send queries, receive answers, and then respond to those answers instead of starting a new query or request. People can now exchange information back and forth between servers more efficiently.

One of the key benefits of WSCI is that it bridges the gap between business process management and Web services by describing how a Web service can be used as part of a larger, more complex business process. These business processes may reside entirely within the confines of a single company, or span across multiple organizations or companies.

WSCI provides an important foundation for realizing the promise of Web services to deliver automated, application to application collaboration.

“Interoperability of Web services needs to extend beyond basic messaging, and WSCI enables Web services to interact with each other in specified ways to accomplish the needs of complex business processes,” said Richard Green, vice president and general manager, Java & XML Technologies, Sun Microsystems. “This is a major step forward for the industry and will provide a key piece of technology to support Sun’s Java Web Services software initiatives.”

The WSCI specification as well as information such as FAQs, white papers, and code examples are available for public comment and royalty free download from each of the co-editor’s Web sites:

BEA: http://dev2dev.bea.com/techtrack/wsci.jsp

Intalio: http://www.intalio.com/wsci

SAP: http://ifr.sap.com/wsci

SUN: http://www.sun.com/software/xml

After a public review period, WSCI will be submitted, on a royalty-free
basis, to an industry standards body.


Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends & analysis

Latest Posts

Related Stories