WS-CAF

Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) is an open framework developed by OASIS. Its purpose is to define a generic and open framework for applications that contain multiple services used together, which are sometimes referred to as composite applications. WS-CAF characteristics include interoperability, ease of implementation and ease of use.

Scope

The scope of WS-CAF includes:

• Provision of WSDL definitions for context, coordination and transactions.
• Message formats will be specified as SOAP headers and/or body content.
• The specification is to be programming language-neutral and platform-neutral.
• Demonstrated composability with other Web Service specifications that are being developed as open, recognized standards
• The goals of promoting convergence, consistent use, and a coherent architecture.
• Support composability as a critical architectural characteristic of Web service specifications. WS-CAF and WS-Context are targeted to become building blocks for other Web service specifications and standards.

Input specifications

The WS-CAF accepts the following Web services specifications as input:

• WS-Context
• WS-Coordination Framework (WS-CF)
• WS-Transaction Management (WS-TXM)

Benefits

The benefits and results of CAF are intended to be standard and interoperable ways to:

• Demarcate and coordinate web service activities
• Propagate and coordinate context information
• Notify participants of changes in an activity
• Define the relationship of coordinators to each other
• Recover transactions predictably and consistently in a business process execution.
• Interact across multiple transaction models (such as are used in CORBA, CICS, Enterprise JavaBeans or .NET environments).

See also

• WS-Coordination - an alternative transaction standard
• Enterprise service bus

External links

• NetBeans SOA Composite Application Project Home
• camelse
• Running Apache Camel in OpenESB