I’m writing this from the OASIS WS-CAF meeting hosted by Oracle at Redwood Shores, just south of San Francisco.
The committee just saw the first live demo of WS-Context specification implementations. WS-Context is one of the three specifications in WS-CAF (the others are the WS-Coordination Framework and WS-Transaction Management).
WS-Context defines a generic mechanism for managing execution specific information such as security tokens, transaction IDs, and device addresses. The demo illustrates sharing shopping cart information across multiple Web sites.
Interoperability was achieved between implementations by Oracle and Arjuna, and IONA (although unfortunately due to a setup problem on my laptop, I wasn't able to show it live at the meeting). I hope to fix the problem overnight and add my piece to the demo in the morning.
In any case, it was a good step forward for the WS-CAF technical committee. The demo showed a common context shared across two Web storefronts so that a single order could be placed across the two sites. It’s not quite finished, but it was a good start, and did at least prove interoperability across three vendor implementations. We are hoping for a public demo this Fall.