Green, Alastair J. wrote:

>I think we should be a little more cautious about the maturity of all these
specs, and have more of an eye to product completeness and maturity, including
ability to protect users from standards variation and flux.
>
>The WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction (later WS-AT and WS-BA) specs have in
fact been out since August 2002 (we implemented them in Cohesions 2.0 in the
ensuing six months, alongside BTP). The specs were revised in September 2003,
and then again in November 2004. They have not changed vastly over these last
two years.
>
>They are therefore not that new, and they unfortunately add very little to the
thinking or functionality of OASIS BTP, which was completed in June 2002 (and
which has the advantage of being a single spec, not two).
>
>
I think it's fair to say that the WS-AA/WS-BA specifications have been
around in one form or another since before BTP began. Their genesis as
Web Services specifications predates BTP by several months. However, I
think that is less important than the fact that they are based on well
founded technologies and protocols that go back to the 60's (WS-AA) and
the late 80's (Sagas) - it's even arguable that it goes back earlier
with Jim Gray's seminal paper on Sphere's of Control, while at IBM. I
believe it is unfair to try to imply that the specifications are
immature compared to something else (anything else for that matter).

>We therefore have (including the latest contender, WS-CAF) three families and
six protocols, to do one job: distributed service coordination using a two-phase
outcome approach. This is a symptom of how the standards need to settle down if
we are to see any level of genuine interoperability at work. They are useful
work, but customers need to be protected from this flux to make use of product
in this area.
>
>
I believe the dust is beginning to settle. If you check out what
analysts and other "luminaries" in the business are saying, they are
talking about the transaction approach in WS-CAF and the IBM/MSFT/BEA
specifications. These two approaches are sufficiently similar that,
hopefully, some amalgam of them will be what the industry moves forward
with. There are differences, to be sure, but as we've just seen with
OASIS WS-DM being adopted as a standard despite the fact that the
specifications it references aren't finalised yet, there is customer
demand for these protocols now. Jumping in the water with something
based on WS-AA/WS-BA and/or WS-CAF is a good approach IMO. There are
certainly more commercial implementations of these specifications than
any other Web Services transaction protocol.

>Another manifestation of the earliness of *interoperable* loosely-coupled
transactions is the status of the specs. Unlike BTP, which has been through an
open standards process to become an OASIS Committee Draft 1.1, and reflects
product implementation experience, the WS-C+Tx specs are still in a proprietary
workshop process, and will have to go through a standards body to stabilize.
Don't expect stable output earlier than twelve or eighteen months from now. The
WS-CAF process also grinds slow, and the specs are changing a lot as they go.
>
>
See above. This is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

<Stuff deleted.>

I hope that the industry can compete on implementations and not
standards, so it's right (as Alastair suggests) that any potential user
needs to ask questions. The questions suggested by Alastair aren't
necessarily all written from an objective standpoint, and I'm not going
to comment on them further, or even try to come up with my own set
(which admittedly may not be 100% objective either). But users asking
questions of vendors is nothing new and it's a good thing for the
industry as a whole, since it's a great way (though definitely not the
best way) of getting user feedback into this kind of process.

Mark.