The final WS-Tx TC meeting?

Last week we had what will probably be the final WS-Transaction TC (WS-Tx) face-to-face meeting, here in Hursley in the UK. Its nice to have everyone else do all the travelling now and again.
I have co-chaired the TC with Eric since November 2005 and we are now nearing the end of the standardization process.


The TC will shortly vote on the approval of committee specification status for our 3 specs - WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity. This is the penultimate stage before submitting to the OASIS membership for consideration as an OASIS standard.

You can see the excitement on the faces of the technical committee as we prepare for the final stage of the standards effort...

The photo was taken in the Kings Head in Hursley, by Bob Freund.


Its been a long and winding road - early drafts of the input specs were published as long ago as 2002 and the foundation WS-Coordination specification was itself inspired by earlier work on the CORBA Activity service. There are already several generally available implementations of the input specifications and pre-production implementations of the proposed final standard. It is to be hoped that the proven success of the WS-Tx protocols in existing, commercially available products together with the extensible nature of WS-Coordination will make this technology the obvious base for new types of coordination protocols. Time will tell...

Margaret Thatcher and me

I am proud to have one thing in common with The Iron Lady.

Before she married Dennis, became Prime Minister, destroyed Britain's coal industry, and gave us all a laugh by leaving Downing Street in tears, Margaret Roberts was a research chemist whose work included the study of Langmuir-Blodgett films, the topic of my own PhD. Margaret and I both moved on from our careers in research.

Ultimately though, neither of us was as successful as Katherine Blodgett who, as you can see from the link, went on to become Queen Elizabeth II.

WS-ResourceTransfer update

In 2006 IBM, Microsoft, HP and Intel announced an initiative to unify the WSDM and WS-Management standards supporting service management. This initiative includes the unification of the infrastructure that underpins WSDM and WS-Management. I'm the editor of the first specification published (in Aug 2006) as part of that initiative - WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT) - which defines a Web service retrieval and update protocol for manageable resources. This specification took as its inputs the WS-Transfer W3C member submission and the WS-ResourceFramework (WSRF) OASIS standard; our goal is to bring together the two communities using these specifications, and those that build on them,

At the time of writing the most recent activity on this specification was the public feedback workshop held in Cupertino, CA, on 6 Dec 2006. The feedback we received was generally very positive and will be factored in a future revision of this specification. A foilset that describes the WS-RT specification and the feedback we received are available through the WS-RT Workshop YahooGroup.