Rumors had been around for a while that this might happen, and it did: the WS-Transaction specs (proprietary work until recently) are now under the custody of the OASIS standards body: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ws-tx

Vendors supporting the WS-TX initiative include BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and TIBCO. This sounds like the kind of industry momentum needed to push acceptance in the market:-)

The new standardization committee is open to anybody - I would participate too if it weren't for the strict IPR policies used by OASIS…

Another nice project done by/at my former CS research group (by one of my ex-colleagues, Cesare Pautasso): JOpera, a process engine for web services.

This technology could be used to build a BPEL engine or any other type of workflow engine for service-oriented architectures.

I wonder if they need transaction support -- if so I know where to get it I also think BPEL and its compensation model have serious flaws, maybe this tool can offer something better.

Earlier on, I have complained about the problems in JAX-RPC (and I am not the only one, it seems).

Today, I found out about the Axis 2 project, which seems to deal with many of the problems of the current JAX-RPC.

Definitely a step in the right direction!

Have you ever implemented a web service with JAX-RPC? I did, and it was not that easy. Our technical requirements were the following:

1. we needed to be able to send/receive asynchronous (one-way) document/literal SOAP messages
2. we needed a convenient way to parse/generate the XML
3. we needed to be able to send custom SOAP faults for asynchronous error conditions
4. we needed to be able to process header blocks easily
5. we needed reasonable support for header bindings in the WSDL document
6. we needed to be able to associate server-side header information with thread-specific information in the service being called
7. If possible, we wanted to be able to associate handlers with custom, servlet-based endpoints (not JAX-RPC endpoints)

With the current state of the art in Java's JAX-RPC and JAXB, this was certainly possible but not at all straightforward. 1 and 2 are not so much of a problem, but the Java web services stack falls short on all the other items. So if any of the JAX-RPC committee members read this: I hope these comments or experiences can help in improving/clarifying the JAX-RPC technology…

It took a long time to finish, but at last the WS-Transaction specification is now available in version 1.0!

This specification consists of two concrete standards, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity. Besides BTP (released at OASIS a few years ago), this is the first 'official' release of a WS standard for transactions across web services.

Unlike BTP, this one is backed by industry giants, and very compact as well. At the very least, this gives us a likely candidate for industry-wide adoption.

There are still some things that I don't like -- to name one, the compensation model is built to suit BPEL4WS meaning that it has no business-level actions upon close of the activity (the Atomikos compensation model does a lot more to foster service autonomy and business-level status of activities).

But at least the atomic transaction part seems acceptable…