Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the concept of businesses electronically communicating information that was traditionally communicated on paper, such as purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices. Technical standards for EDI exist to facilitate parties transacting such instruments without having to make special arrangements.
SOAP is a messaging protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. It uses XML Information Set for its message format, and relies on application layer protocols, most often Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), although some legacy systems communicate over Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for message negotiation and transmission.
In computer science, ACID is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a sequence of database operations that satisfies the ACID properties is called a transaction. For example, a transfer of funds from one bank account to another, even involving multiple changes such as debiting one account and crediting another, is a single transaction.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.
The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL, is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Processes in BPEL export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively.
A distributed transaction is a database transaction in which two or more network hosts are involved. Usually, hosts provide transactional resources, while the transaction manager is responsible for creating and managing a global transaction that encompasses all operations against such resources. Distributed transactions, as any other transactions, must have all four ACID properties, where atomicity guarantees all-or-nothing outcomes for the unit of work.
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
Web Services Security is an extension to SOAP to apply security to Web services. It is a member of the Web service specifications and was published by OASIS.
Tuxedo is a middleware platform used to manage distributed transaction processing in distributed computing environments. Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction-oriented middleware, or enterprise application server for a variety of systems and programming languages. Developed by AT&T in the 1980s, it became a software product of Oracle Corporation in 2008 when they acquired BEA Systems. Tuxedo is now part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware.
WS-Transaction is a Web Services specification developed by BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft. The WS-Transaction specification describes coordination types that are used with the extensible coordination framework described in the WS-Coordination specification. It defines two coordination types: Atomic Transaction (AT) for individual operations, and Business Activity (BA) for long running transactions. Developers can use either or both of these coordination types when building applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed activities.
WS-Coordination is a Web Services specification developed by BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft and accepted by OASIS Web Services Transaction TC in its 1.2 version. It describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Such coordination protocols are used to support a number of applications, including those that need to reach consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed transactions.
In computing, a composite application is a software application built by combining multiple existing functions into a new application. The technical concept can be compared to mashups. However, composite applications use business sources of information, while mashups usually rely on web-based, and often free, sources.
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.
The execution of a business process consists of one or more transactions. Each transaction may consist of several individual operations yet, as a whole, it moves the system between consistent states.
Apache Axis2 is a web service engine. It is a redesign and re-write of the widely used Apache Axis SOAP stack. Implementations of Axis2 are available in Java and C.
Web Service Atomic Transaction is an OASIS standard. To achieve all-or-nothing property for a group of services, it defines three protocols, and a set of services. These protocols and services together ensure automatic activation, registration, propagation and atomic termination of web services. The protocols are implemented via the WS-Coordination context management framework and emulate ACID transaction properties.
Event-driven SOA is a form of service-oriented architecture (SOA), combining the intelligence and proactiveness of event-driven architecture with the organizational capabilities found in service offerings. Before event-driven SOA, the typical SOA platform orchestrated services centrally, through pre-defined business processes, assuming that what should have already been triggered is defined in a business process. This older approach does not account for events that occur across, or outside of, specific business processes. Thus complex events, in which a pattern of activities—both non-scheduled and scheduled—should trigger a set of services is not accounted for in traditional SOA 1.0 architecture.
Service choreography in business computing is a form of service composition in which the interaction protocol between several partner services is defined from a global perspective. The idea underlying the notion of service choreography can be summarised as follows:
"Dancers dance following a global scenario without a single point of control"
Frank Leymann is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He is professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and director and founder of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS).
