Sun, BEA, Others Publish New Web Services Spec

Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Intalio and SAP have made the new spec, Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI), available for review on their Web sites, said Susy Struble, manager of XML industry initiatives at Sun.

WSCI can be downloaded royalty-free from the following sites: http://deve2dev.bea.com/techtrack/wsci.jsp; http://www.intalio.com/wsci; http://ifr.sap.com/wsci; and http://www.sun.com/software/xml, said Struble.

WSCI provides an interface describing the flow of messages of a Web service, said Struble.

"It starts to begin to give more necessary descriptive information about [the service's capabilities to make it useful in a business process," said Struble.

To help solution providers and developers become familiar with WSCI, Sun will release a new tool, the Sun ONE Web Service Choreography Interface Editor, on its Web site Friday for free download, she added.

Karsten Riemer, a Sun XML architect, said WSCI picks up where WSDL leaves off in describing what a Web service does. For instance, WSDL will describe the functions of a particular service, but not how those functions relation to each other, said Riemer.

"WSCI describes all the relationships between all the things you can do [with a Web service," said Riemer. "It's the sequence of steps, the glue around individual WSDL operations."

Struble said Sun and the companies that developed WSCI hope to submit the spec to a standards body such as the W3C once companies have had a chance to review WSCI.

Sun is recognized as one of the industry leaders in Web services development. But reports that IBM and Microsoft purposefully prevented Sun from becoming a board member of the recently established Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) group have cast Sun as an outsider in leading the evolution of Web services interoperability.

Sun's membership in WS-I is still pending. Sun executives have said Sun will not join unless it is given a board position. The WS-I has yet to offer a board position to Sun but recently voted to invite two new board members to join.

Struble said Sun is "pleased to be taking a leadership" role in promoting Web services interoperability with the WSCI spec. She would not comment on whether the spec would become a part of the blueprints WS-I is developing to promote interoperability. However, Struble said once WSCI is donated to a standards body, WS-I would be as welcome as anyone else to use the spec.