Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) is an open framework developed by OASIS

OASIS (organization)

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards...

. Its purpose is to define a generic and open framework for applications that contain multiple services used together, which are sometimes referred to as composite application

Composite application

In computing, the term composite application expresses a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple existing functions into a new application. The technical concept can be compared to mashups...

s. WS-CAF characteristics include interoperability, ease of implementation and ease of use.

Scope

The scope of WS-CAF includes:

• Provision of WSDL
  Web Services Description Language
  The Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...
  
   definitions for context, coordination and transactions.
• Message formats will be specified as SOAP
  SOAP
  SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
  
   headers and/or body content.
• The specification is to be programming language-neutral and platform-neutral.
• Demonstrated composability with other Web Service specifications that are being developed as open, recognized standards
• The goals of promoting convergence, consistent use, and a coherent architecture.
• Support composability as a critical architectural characteristic of Web service specifications. WS-CAF and WS-Context are targeted to become building blocks for other Web service specifications and standards.

Input specifications

The WS-CAF accepts the following Web services specifications as input:

• WS-Context
  WS-Context
  WS-Context is a web services specification developed by OASIS . It is part of the WS-CAF suite. Its purpose is to provide a means to reference a shared context, which relates a set of interactions between web services...
  
  
• WS-Coordination Framework (WS-CF)
• WS-Transaction Management (WS-TXM)

Benefits

The benefits and results of CAF are intended to be standard and interoperable ways to:

• Demarcate and coordinate web service activities
• Propagate and coordinate context information
• Notify participants of changes in an activity
• Define the relationship of coordinators to each other
• Recover transactions predictably and consistently in a business process execution.
• Interact across multiple transaction models (such as are used in CORBA
  Çorba
  Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
  
  , CICS
  CICS
  Customer Information Control System is a transaction server that runs primarily on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE.CICS is a transaction manager designed for rapid, high-volume online processing. This processing is mostly interactive , but background transactions are possible...
  
  , Enterprise JavaBean
  Enterprise JavaBean
  Enterprise JavaBeans is a managed, server-side component architecture for modular construction of enterprise applications.The EJB specification is one of several Java APIs in the Java EE specification. EJB is a server-side model that encapsulates the business logic of an application...
  
  s or .NET
  .NET Framework
  The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...
  
  environments).