Negative votes prompt BPEL 2.0 review

InfoWorld - Although the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0 specification was approved in an organizational vote, OASIS has postponed any formal announcement while it investigates some negative votes, a representative of OASIS said on Wednesday.

Theoretically, the matter could prompt OASIS to restart the whole review process. Voting on the measure closed this past weekend.

Often referred to simply as BPEL, the specification blurs the distinction between description and execution by using XML to define business processes.

The OASIS BPEL technical committee is scheduled to resolve the issue on April 11 and will announce results then, said OASIS spokeswoman Carol Geyer in an e-mail.

"It could be a very minor thing," she said. "Sometimes a negative vote is cast in error because someone didn't understand something about the spec. Nevertheless, when a negative vote is cast, even if there are an overwhelming number of affirmative votes for the spec to pass, the [technical committee] still must formally convene, discuss and decide what they want to do."

Depending on why negative votes were cast, the committee could proceed without change, reevaluate the specification, make edits or restart the process.

"It's up to the [committee] members. If the [committee] votes to proceed, the affirmative votes will carry, WS-BPEL will be declared an OASIS standard and I'll issue the press release," Geyer said.

This process is "not unusual," she said.

OASIS said last week BPEL 2.0 was expected to be approved by organization members. First proposed in 2002 by a group of vendors led by Microsoft Corp. and IBM, the specification for orchestration of Web services was submitted to OASIS in May 2003. BPEL is considered important for deploying SOA.
Ratification of a formal standard is expected to provide reassurances to anyone interested in implementing the specification. Version 1.1 of BPEL has been in use but was never formally ratified as an OASIS standard.

OASIS did not provide information Wednesday on which members voted against BPEL 2.0.

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