Sun, Oracle, and others publish Web Services Composite Applications Framework Five middleware vendors have designed a set of guidelines to smooth the bumps that can arise when groups of Web services are combined to complete a transaction or share information.Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Fujitsu Software, Iona Technologies, and Arjuna Technologies published the Web Services Composite Applications Framework (WS-CAF). To promote WS-CAF’s broad use, the companies plan to submit the specification to an industry standards group and plan to allow for its use on a royalty-free basis. Although they were not part of the announcement, key Web services players Microsoft and IBM said they plan to review the specification.WS-CAF aims to simplify complex Web services transactions by defining a set of rules for coordinating transactions in long-running business processes, the group said. WS-CAF actually is a collection of three specifications: WS-CTX (Web Service Context), WS-CF (Web Service Coordination Framework), and WS-TXM (Web Service Transaction Management). WS-CTX unites the various transactions involved in an activity by providing a common context; WS-CF is a mechanism for sharing that context with services; and WS-TXM allows participants in an activity to negotiate their behavior, which is particularly important if a transaction goes awry. WS-CAF addresses market and business needs for coordinating composite applications, said Stephen O’Grady, an analyst at RedMonk, in Bath, Maine. “There are other pieces of technology that touch on composite applications, but this is the first one specifically designed with composite applications in mind,” O’Grady said. Software Development