Steering the course
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
Amid the drive to achieve industrywide interoperability of Web services, vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are aiming to steer the IT world toward accepting their technologies as standards. Web services currently are being subjected to a plethora of proposed standards to iron out issues such as business processes, messaging, communications, and security. Most recently IBM, Microsoft, and BEA left Sun out of a proposal for business processes standardization, called BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), which irked Sun officials.
BPEL4WS represents the marriage of two rival standards: IBM's WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) and Microsoft's XLang. An executable language, BPEL4WS is designed to ensure that differing business processes can understand one another in a Web services environment.