From: Sally Khudairi (sk@zotgroup.com)
Date: Thu Oct 26 2000 - 18:53:59 PDT
XAML Web services standard proposed
Paul Taylor
GMT Oct 27, 2000, 12:40 AM | ET Oct 26, 2000, 07:40 PM | PT Oct 26, 2000,
04:40 PM
New York - Four of the world's biggest IT companies have joined forces with
Bowstreet, the pioneering 'plug-and-play' e-commerce software specialist, to
help define a vendor-neutral industry standard that will enable the
coordination and processing of online, multiparty transactions in the
rapidly emerging world of XML-based Web services.
The four - Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems - have joined
Bowstreet's XAML (Transaction Authority Markup Language) initiative. The
initiative is a crucial step toward building the infrastructure that will
enable companies to more easily engage in e-commerce and use Web-based
services from different partners to develop new products and services.
A standard like XAML is needed to enable Web-based business transactions
that allow multiple organizations to coordinate their operations in order to
handle the basic elements of a B2B trade. XAML will enable businesses to
expose or advertise their transactional capabilities through their Web
services.
For example, consider an industrial company that needs to purchase a direct
material such as benzene to produce its finished goods. The company may look
to purchase from a highly visible chemical industry leader. As the company
selects the product from an electronic marketplace, it will also specify the
required terms of the purchase, such as shipping availability and delivery
options, payment financing, casualty insurance and governmental compliance
for safe transport.
All of these interrelated requirements need to be satisfied prior to a
purchase transaction being committed. Equally importantly, if one of these
services fails to commit its operation, XAML provides the protocol that
allows the industrial company to interact with other Web services to cancel,
compensate or find alternative actions.
"Companies are beginning the process of exposing and combining their
services on the Internet. As these Web services interactions mature, the
need to ensure the integrity of their customers' transactions becomes more
important," said David Smith, vice president and research area director at
Gartner. "With broad industry support, efforts such as XAML could make all
the difference between a robust and orderly Net marketplace and one where
buyers and sellers spend most of their time resolving fouled transactions
offline."
Although Microsoft is notably absent from the list of XAML participants,
Bowstreet executives expressed confidence that the world's largest software
company would join the initiative eventually.
Microsoft has made its version of Web services - dubbed .NET - the
cornerstone of its future strategy and has been actively pushing its own
version of XML, Biztalk. However, Microsoft is a member of another industry
group set up in September that is trying to establish a common networked
registry of business and Net services. Other members of Project UDDI
(universal description, discovery and integration) include IBM, Ariba and
Sun Microsystems, with Bowstreet serving as a founding advisor.
The XAML project participants envisage submitting it to one or several
standards bodies that may include the W3C, OASIS (Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and/or the IETF (Internet
Engineering Task Force).
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