OASIS has approved as an official standard WS-Context 1.0, bolstering Web services in transactional environments.Specifically, WS-Context defines a framework supporting coordinated and transactional compositions for multiple Web services applications, OASIS said on Wednesday. WS-Context ensures that multiple Web services deployed in a variety of execution environments behave as if they are being deployed in a single, consistent environment, according to OASIS. “For example, an organization’s SOA may require security information, conversational session information, database and file handles and process IDs, among other services, to be shared across multiple execution environments built on different platforms. WS-Context ensures that the Java, .Net, and other Web services in the enterprise all behave similarly and as expected at runtime,” said Martin Chapman, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework Technical Committee and an Oracle official, in a statement released by OASIS. “When Web services are used in combination, the ability to set the boundaries of an activity (such as start/end or success/failure) and to inform participants of changes to activities become extremely important,” explained Eric Newcomer of Iona Technologies, also a co-chair of the committee, in the statement.“WS-Context provides standard, interoperable ways to demarcate and coordinate Web services activities. Business process transactions can be recovered predictably and consistently with WS-Context, and the standard allows participants to define their relationships with one another,” Newcomer said. Other companies besides Iona and Oracle that participated in development of WS-Context include Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. Software Development