BEA Position Paper on the W3C Web Services Workshop

			   Todd Karakashian
			  BEA Systems, Inc.
		    eCommerce Server Business Unit
			    12 March 2001


Introduction

BEA supports a W3C initiative to develop standards for the rapidly
developing area of technology of "web services". We believe this
technology is fundamental to the development of new World Wide Web
infrastructure that has the potential to take the Web beyond simple
request-response, browser-based services into a realm with a much
richer panoply of clients which interact with services provided via a
diverse variety of computing and processing paradigms.


Process and Scope Requirements 

In this section we would like to offer some opinions about the process
that should be followed in and the scope of any W3C Web Services
standards effort.

We believe that the overriding requirement is that the standards
process must proceed in a very time-accelerated manner. The pace of
technological development the market needs for web services is
such that if the standards process takes too long it will become
effectively irrelevant. 

Accordingly, we make the following recommendations for the process and
scope:

1) We believe that imperfect technology provided sooner is better than
   allegedly perfect technology provided later. We are very concerned
   that if the standards efforts at W3C do not proceed with alacrity,
   they will be marginalized.

2) We endorse the idea that web services be broken into a layered
   architecture of standards. These standards would be developed in an
   incremental, layered way, from the bottom up. Each standard would
   be fully functional on its own and would serve as a foundation for
   the implementation of the standards above it.

3) Because of the diversity of environments that would be part of the
   Web, we propose that the W3C should provide a special focus on
   efforts to support interoperability of web services (more on this
   below).


Technology Areas

Here we mention three key areas in which we would like to see
standards developed as a top priority:

1) Messaging:

   At this time, BEA has made a commitment to the following
   technologies that are commonly thought of as part of web services
   messaging: SOAP 1.1 w/ attachments and ebXML TRP.  We are
   interested in seeing these technologies reconciled as part of the
   W3C XML Protocol work.

2) Service Definition:

   We would like to see a service description language included in the
   standards. At the present time, BEA has made a commitment to WSDL
   1.0 as a supported service definition language for web services.

3) Interoperability specifications:

   We believe the W3C could provide a very valuable contribution
   by defining standards for interoperability of web services between
   diverse application deployment environments. 

   This goes beyond specifying the wire-level protocols. In
   particular, we suggest the W3C provide an explicit definition of
   interoperability requirements to be part of the standards. This
   will allow vendors to certify that their web service
   implementations are interoperable with others and will ensure that
   any unexpected "degrees of freedom" in the implementation of the
   standards can be resolved.

After significant progress has been made in these first three areas,
we would support discussions within the W3C regarding involvement in
value-add layers above the basic messaging and service support.
Because progress has already been made by other organizations in these
areas, we urge the W3C to work cooperatively with these other
organizations in developing the standards. We do recognize the W3C'S
strengths in base protocol definitions and interoperability, but we
urge the consideration of the time-to-market needs for these
technologies:

4) Service Discovery:

   Currently, we feel the technology in this space is very immature.
   We would like to see a resolution between the ebXML registry
   technology and UDDI. We feel UDDI is much farther along in terms of
   maturity, but observe that there are still serious unresolved
   issues with it that prevent it from being a useful technology.

5) Security:

   BEA would like to see mechanisms for digital signatures, encryption
   included into a web services messages and approve of the current W3C 
   activities in these areas.

6) Transactions:

   BEA would like to see mechanisms for transactional integrity
   supported in web services messages.