Fw: WSFL, IBM, and WSDL

[Abid Farooqui <farooqui@tampabay.rr.com>]

Oh I also forgot to mention about WFSL ... it kind of also tells you in what
order to call different methods of a web service. If you have a shopping
cart service with methods like "getCart", "addItem", "checkOut" etc. It will
not make sense to try to checkOut before at least calling "getCart" right?
These things are kind of missing from WSDL. Although they can be easily
added there. They did not have to come up with a new thing for all the
features that are in WFSL. There is a very good article talking about some
problems within WSDL in the June/July issue of XML magazine
(http://www.xmlmag.com).
Check it out.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Abid Farooqui" <farooqui@tampabay.rr.com>
To: "Dave Kuhlman" <dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 10:33 PM
Subject: Re: WSFL, IBM, and WSDL


> I have some first or I should say second hand knowledge about this
> personally.
> As you know WSDL (Web Services Descriptive Language) is not officially the
> part of WebServices spec but was a brainChild from Microsoft. Although w/o
> something like WSDL webservices kind of don't make any sense but IBM of
> course had to come up with something so they have WSFL which is a bit
> different than WSDL and is a little more like BizTalk framework's
> counterpart of its own (I don't exactly remember on what exactly is the
> acronym is in BizTalk right now) but also WFSL also quite eerily looks
like
> something that was the idea of one of IBM's partner companies right here
in
> Florida (Hmmmm ...). Anyway IBM does what it wants but I don't think this
> has much to do with ebXML.
> Oh you asked for a comparison. Well, on a high level WSDL is generic and
it
> does not focus on business processes. Its objective is to describe any web
> service. You can make a weather report a web service. Now my web services
> client will have to know how to call your weather report web service. In
> WSDL you specify the URN so I know how to reach the web service, you will
> specify what methods/functions I can call. For instance you may have 2
> methods. One may be DetailedWeatherReport and the other may be
> WeatherSummary. You also specify what parameters I need to provide to
these
> methods. Lets say I want a weather summary of Tampa, Fl. I may write a
> simple web sevices client by looking at your WSDL that you have published
in
> some UDDI server or something that will call your web service and provide
it
> the necessory parameters. Lets say your WeatherSummary method takes in 2
> parameters, a city and a state. Hence I pass it 2 Strings (Tampa, Florida)
> like that and it responds back with a weather summary for Tampa Florida.
> In contrast WFSL is more focussed on business. It will not just specify
URN,
> methods publicly available from the service but it will provide for
> transactions that may use many parts and many methods and if the whole
thing
> isn't done, it will rollback everything. there are other feaures too that
> are very much like its counterpart in BizTalk.It just makes more sense on
> doing some business contracts. Just wait till IBM puts out a toolkit and
> play with it, it becomes very clear very quickly.
> Sincerely,
> Abid Farooqui
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dave Kuhlman" <dkuhlman@cutter.rexx.com>
> To: <ebxml-dev@lists.ebxml.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 6:48 PM
> Subject: WSFL, IBM, and WSDL
>
>
> >
> > I found this article about IBM submitting a proposal for WSFL to
> > W3C:
> >
> > http://iwsun4.infoworld.com/articles/fe/xml/01/06/04/010604feedge.xml
> >
> > I did not see any mention of ebXML.  Is this part of the ebXML plan
> > or is IBM going off on its own proprietary thing here?
> >
> > It sounds like WSFL is intended to describe business processes and
> > sequences of BPs.  Am I right about that?
> >
> > And, is WSFL related to WSDL?  If so, could someone give a
> > comparison of these two.
> >
> > Whew!  I wish there were a glossary someplace to enable me to learn
> > all these acronyms.  It would be nice if we had a glossary of terms
> > and acronyms and if each entry in the glossary contained references
> > to the ebXML specifications and reports which discussed that item.
> >
> >   - Dave
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dave Kuhlman
> > dkuhlman@rexx.com
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
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