Collaxa readies Web services tool

Collaxa within two months plans to release a Web services deployment tool that utilizes the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification backed by IBM, Microsoft, and BEA Systems.

Collaxa Orchestration Server 2.0, which is now available in an evaluation release, is intended to enable developers to publish asynchronous and synchronous Web services and utilize them for transactional business flows, according to Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Collaxa. A console based on BPEL4WS provides for reporting, auditing, and debugging capabilities. The product offers the industry's first implementation of a BPEL4WS-based orchestration server, said Doron Sherman, Collaxa CTO.

The primary intention of Orchestration Server is to develop reliable business flows using XML, Web services, and J2EE, Sherman said. The tool provides support for publishing asynchronous Web services and composing Web services for use in long-running business transactions, according to the company.

"Basically, an orchestration server coordinates Web services," said Sherman.

The product backs two proposed standards from IBM, Microsoft, and BEA: BPEL4WS and WS-Transaction. By supporting these, Collaxa can provide a standard way for developing business flows without having to utilize proprietary EAI mechanisms, Sherman said. Developers also do not need to build their own custom architecture, he added.

BPEL4WS competes with a Sun-proposed specification, Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), although Sherman said there is not complete overlap. BPEL4WS supports both orchestration, for private implementations of interactions between Web services, and choreography, which serves as an external interface for Web services interactions, Sherman said. WSCI only covers choreography, he said.

Collaxa anticipates BPEL4WS will become an industry standard, Sherman said. "We believe IBM, Microsoft, and BEA [are] the industry heavyweights [and they have] the critical mass necessary for making BPEL4WS the de facto standard in the industry," Sherman said.

While WSCI has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for its consideration as an industry standard, BPEL4WS has yet to be submitted to such an organization.

Version 2.0 of Orchestration Server supports Web services deployments on the BEA WebLogic Server, JBoss, IBM WebSphere, and Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) application servers. JBoss is bundled with the evaluation product.

Additional features in Version 2.0 include the ability to monitor execution of business flows via a visual audit trail, a BPEL4WS debugger, support for e-mailing of Microsoft Excel files, the ability to send and receive messages through JMS (Java Message Service) queues, and topics and manipulation of XML documents via XPath.