RE: WS CAF FAQ v5 (concall notice)

[Keith Swenson <KSwenson@fsw.fujitsu.com>]

Please add the following question and answer to the WS-CAF FAQ  (I hope this satisfies a commitment I made a while ago to do this)

How is WS-CAF related to ASAP?

The Asynchronous Service Access Protcol is another OASIS working group started recently to standardize certain types of web service interactions.  In essence, ASAP is answering the need to be able to start a service at one point in time, and then come back later to check on the status.  ASAP also includes a way for the initiator to leave an address for the service to send a notification message back to to tell it that it is completed.  In this nomenclature an "Asynchronous Web Service" is Web Service that implementes standard operations to support starting and monitoring of a task which is expect to take a long time to complete.

In contrast to this, WS-CAF is aimed to handle the problem of how to contact multiple web services, and to coordinate these interactions.  In essence, it is to allow multiple web services to act as if they were part of a single composite application.

The purpose of these two standards efforts are orthogonal to each other.  If you wanted to use ASAP in order to start two different asynchronous services in a coordinated manner, you would use WS-CAF tags in the header of the requests to make sure that either both services are start or neither are started.  This could not be accomplished using ASAP alone.  While WS-CAF allows (different) web services to coordinated, it does not say anything about the actual request that is being made.  ASAP specifies the actual request that must be made to achieve a particular outcome.

The goal then in both groups is to coordinate their efforts to be sure that implementors can use both standards at the same time.

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(Hopefullly you all agree?)

-Keith

 

Keith D Swenson, kswenson@fsw.fujitsu.com
Fujitsu Software Corporation
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