Publication
Communications of the ACM
Review
The next step in web services
Abstract
The specifications which assist web services in moving from the basic framework of 'describe, publish, interact' capability to a service-oriented computing paradigm, are discussed. The specifications include the business process execution language (BPEL), web services coordination and web services transactions, and web services security and web services reliable messaging. BPEL defines a language for creating service compositions in the form of business processes. Web services coordination and web services transaction complement BPEL to provide mechanisms for defining specific standard protocols for use by transaction processing systems.