Analyst Stephen O'Grady of research firm RedMonk LLC praised the specification, but said that adoption would depend on more than just its technical merit.
"It's a nice piece of technology and we definitely see a market for it and a business need for it," O'Grady said. "There are other pieces of technology that touch on composite applications but this is the first one specifically designed with composite applications in mind."
However, choosing to implement Web services standards is not just a technology question, it's more a political question, he said. "You have to evaluate what your partners are using, the underlying technologies. But just as much you have to pay attention to who's supporting them and what adoption might look like."
The new specifications add to an already tangled clump of Web services coordination specifications with varying degrees of support from standards bodies.
One such, BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), has been adopted by OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, but it still leaves significant gaps that need to be filled, according to Mischkinsky.
"There are all sorts of grandiose claims for that, but if you actually try to do an implementation of BPEL one of the first things you run into is that you need to share context, and all that is left as an exercise for the reader, or programmer, at this point," he said.
Last year, Microsoft and IBM published specifications entitled Web Services Transaction and Web Services Coordination, but according to Oracle's Cheng these overlap with WS-CAF in name only, and aren't going anywhere. "They haven't really done anything with them, and haven't taken them to any standards bodies," he said.
The issue of taking the specification to a standards body could be irrelevant, according to RedMonk's O'Grady.
"The market is much more vendor-driven than standards body-driven," he said.
WS-CAF doesn't require the use of any particular transaction protocol, and businesses that adopt it can use all or part of the specification, the group said. Each vendor has published information about WS-CAF on its Web site.
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