The Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) has been published to solve problems that arise when multiple Web Services are used in combination to support information sharing and transaction processing. The Framework was jointly published by Arjuna Technologies, Fujitsu Software, IONA Technologies, Oracle and Sun. The WS-CAF is a collection of the Web Service Context (WS-CTX) specification, Web Service Coordination Framework (WS-CF) specification and Web Service Transaction Management (WS-TXM) specification.

By defining an open, multi-level framework for standard coordination of long-running business processes across incompatible transaction processing models, the transaction processing (TP) information management and sharing problem is effectively solved by WS-CAF. The authors hope to insure reliability, interoperability and usefulness by donating WS-CAF to a recognized industry standards body under royalty-free licensing terms.

"Developers are rapidly moving from building basic services to developing more complex business applications, where the need for the Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) becomes much greater," said Mark Bauhaus, vice president of JavaTM Web Services at Sun. "Sun is committed to driving the evolution of this important set of Web services specifications in a recognized, open standards forum."

Three specifications make up the WS-CAF:

• Web Service Context (WS-CTX): A lightweight framework for simple context management that helps enable all Web Services participating in an activity to share a common context and exchange information about a common outcome.

• Web Service Coordination Framework (WS-CF): A sharable mechanism that manages context augmentation and lifecycle and provides the notification of outcome messages to Web Services participating in a particular transaction.

• Web Services Transaction Management (WS-TXM): Comprised of three distinct, interoperable transaction protocols that can be used across multiple transaction managers. WS-TXM supports multiple transaction models.

"Recently, a number of Web Services specifications have emerged to address enterprise requirements such as security, reliability, and orchestration. While all of these require some underlying coordination mechanism, the design and interfaces for these features have not been addressed in a uniform manner, resulting in duplicated effort and serious interoperability problems," said Don Deutsch, Vice President of Standards Strategy and Architecture for Oracle. "The Web Services Composite Application Framework, which we soon will be submitting to a recognized standards organization on royalty-free terms, provides a common and open framework for context and transaction management that enables other Web Services specifications to function effectively in an interoperable manner."

For more information, visit the WS-CAF page on the Oracle Technology Network site:

http://otn.oracle.com/tech/webservices/htdocs/spec/ws-caf.html

A 23-page draft of the WS-CAF specification is available for review. It contains figures detailing the relationship between the various specifications and the protocols they support, of WS-CTX as comprising one or more Web Services participants that share a common context, of the relationship of coordinator to Web Services and composite applications, and other figures.

There are also code examples, details on context, scoping, the transaction model service and links to references. For the draft:

http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/webservices/wscaf/primer.pdf

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