Today Arjuna, BEA, Hitachi, IBM, IONA, and Microsoft published updates to the WS-AT, WS-BA, and WS-Coordination specifications.
Our press release can be found here.
The specs can be found in the Artix devcenter, and on the Arjuna, Hitachi, IBM, and Microsoft sites.
I am happy about this since I've been working in transaction processing for a while (not to mention blogging about it), and in Web services for a bit more than five years. I wrote a lengthy post about this last December that includes some pointers to other sources of information and kind of summarizes the situation.
Basically, transaction processing remains a somewhat unresolved area of Web services standardization. The updated WS-Transactions specifications, after going through the feedback and interop workshops represent a significant step forward. But it isn't yet the end of the story.
As those of you who have been following this space know, I also contribute to the WS-CAF set of specifications.
Among my goals since I started on this is better alignment between WS-CAF and WS-Transactions, and I'm pretty sure everyone involved in both efforts has heard about this from me by now ;-). I think parts of WS-CAF fit very nicely with WS-Transactions.