In one corner is the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, but most often pronounced "bee-pell"). BPEL4WS is a business process and choreography API that was co-authored by IBM, Microsoft and BEA. Although it is completely proprietary and hasn't even been submitted to a standards-setting body, all three companies already have plans to support the specification in their solutions as though it were a standard. At the very least, IBM and Microsoft will be able to continue focusing on picking off each other's customers as well as BEA's.

Unfortunately, while the three companies steam forward on BPEL4WS, the rest of the world is standing in the other corner with a competing specification--the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI, pronounced "whiskey).

Unlike BPEL4WS, WSCI has taken the first step towards standardization through a submission to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by BPMI.org (which also developed an alternative to BPEL4WS called BPML), Commerce One, Fujitsu Limited, Intalio, IONA, Oracle Corporation, SAP AG, SeeBeyond Technology Corporation, Sun Microsystems, and strange as it may seem, BPEL4WS co-author BEA.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

This industry chasm over the handling of choreography and transactions in service oriented architectures (SOA), and the costs that could be associated with it, are not to be underestimated. Nor is BEA's duplicitous hedging by appearing as a proponent of both.

Forget for a moment the problem of interoperation, or lack thereof, should the industry not agree on a common language for this very critical part of any mission critical application. Let's suppose that BPEL4WS becomes the de facto standard, by virtue of BEA's, Microsoft's, and IBM's support for BPEL4WS in their application servers (which happen to be the application server market's three leading products). The three intellectual property owners would be in the driver's seat not only when it comes to Web services, but for a portion of the Web itself.

It will be exactly the scenario that I've warned about, where the intellectual property owners of one critical protocol could end up in control of an important part of the Internet. At the very least, if you end up being seduced by the promise of standards by using the two Web services protocols (SOAP and WSDL) that IBM and Microsoft shoved down the W3C's throat, it may not be long until you find out that your investment in open standards has locked you into using a proprietary technology.

As I have posited before, following a path where you eventually find yourself locked into a proprietary technology puts the intellectual property owner in control of a lot of things, including cost.

If BPEL4WS becomes the de facto standard for Web services choreography and transactions, will the intellectual property owners take advantage of you? That's not absolutely clear. Implying that there are barriers to BPEL4WS becoming a W3C standard, the W3C's Janet Daly said, "BPEL4WS has a [intellectual property] statement that, as it stands, makes it questionable as to whether it could be used as a foundation piece." That stands in stark contrast to the promise for WSCI, should it progress to the ratification stage at the W3C. The W3C recently adopted a royalty-free position with respect to the standards it ratifies.

Hinting at the Microsoft's potential to control the cost of Web services, WSCI co-submitter Iona Technologies' chief technology officer Eric Newcomer said, "The W3C is trying to take a hard stand on royalties and patents" and that "Microsoft is trying to move to a royalty-based model for the specification. This stalemate between Microsoft and the W3C is about the patent and royalties question."

So far, no legal document release exists that says BPEL4WS will be royalty-free. IBM and BEA have each told me that they have no interest in charging royalties for Web services choreography and transaction protocols. During my keynote interview of IBM's director of Web service strategy Bob Sutor at a CNET Networks-organized Web services conference, Sutor revealed IBM's plans to make its contribution to the BPEL4WS specification available on a royalty-free basis.

BEA's director of Web services strategy John Kiger is similarly committed to a royalty-free path. According to Kiger, "BEA has professed a commitment to making these specifications royalty-free. It remains to be seen if any of the other participants in the process are aligned with that goal. There has not been a submission of BPEL4WS to a standards body, and no intellectual property declaration exists." Echoing the concerns of Iona's Newcomer, Kiger said, "I don't know what Microsoft's position on this will ultimately be."

But Kiger also doesn't believe that industry division over the specifications for choreography and transactions could bring the entire Web services house of cards crashing down. "More important," said Kiger, "are security, reliability, and state. The work on WS-Security should be tackled by the end of 2003 and, recently, a royalty-free WS-Reliability specification was proposed by some companies. Then there's the issue of how you manage and maintain state information across a Web services dialogue. This is being called WS-Conversation. It covers multiple messages whose state must be independently managed. If we have those building blocks as standards, then you can have a very powerful service oriented architecture. BPEL4WS, on the other hand, is an important building block, but not critical to the Web services house."

I'm not so sure. For B2B integration, which has long been called the Holy Grail of Web services, it seems to me that transaction management and choreography are critical building blocks. If they are, then the question is whether the work so far done on BPEL4WS will find its way into the work that the W3C is doing on WSCI, and will it therefore be subject to the W3C's intellectual property policies. This appears to hinge on whether Microsoft is willing do what IBM and BEA have so far pledged--make their contributions royalty-free.

I asked Microsoft's director Web services technical marketing Steven Van Roekel, and he responded, "Microsoft has not made any decisions or announcements in this specific area." The last time we heard Microsoft say this, it also had to do with Web services protocols. During the US v. Microsoft antitrust proceedings, Microsoft Platform Strategy Group General Manager Charles Fitzgerald testified that, although Microsoft had not yet decided whether to charge royalties for Web services specifications under consideration at the W3C, it was at the time reserving the right to do so.

While the specifications in question at the time either turned royalty-free, or lost momentum at the W3C, it looks as though we could be in for another intellectual property-based controversy over Web services.

Previous page |   1 2 3	| Next page

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[an error occurred while processing this directive]