Enterprise Service Bus

Chapter 12. ESB and the Evolution of Web Services

This chapter provides an overview of the evolving web services specifications, and an explanation of how web services and ESBs will move forward together.

There is an evolving set of specifications being branded as the “Web Services Specifications,” commonly referred to in this book as the WS-* family of specifications. Some of the WS-* specifications originated from standards organizations such as the W3C and OASIS, but a large majority are a result of an ad hoc collaborvation of vendors that usually includes Microsoft, IBM, and BEA. Other vendors and organizations, such as Global Grid Forum, RSA, SAP, Sonic, and TIBCO, also collaborate based on their particular area of expertise. For example, the WS-Notification Specification authors include Akamai Technologies, Computer Associates International, Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe, The Globus Alliance, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SAP AG, Sonic Software, and TIBCO Software; the October 2003 WS-ReliableMessaging Interoperability workshops included BEA, IBM, Blue Titan, Microsoft, NEC, Sonic, TIBCO, and Systinet.

The goal of these ad hoc vendor collaborations is to eventually bring the specifications before a standards body, after a considerable amount of public feedback sessions and interoperability workshops have occurred. For some specifications, such as WS-Security, WS-BPEL, and WS-Notification, this has already happened. The reason behind this approach is that these companies feel that defining ...