Web Services Platform Architecture: Soap, Wsdl, Ws-Policy, Ws-Addressing, Ws-Bpel, Ws-Reliable Messaging, and More

This book was a team effort by the folks at IBM who have been working on designing and building the Web services platform. The lead authors of this book—Sanjiva, Francisco (Paco), Frank, Tony, and Don—wrote parts of the book and coordinated contributions from the others. We'll start with descriptions of the five lead authors and then talk about the others who contributed.

Sanjiva Weerawarana received a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1994. After a few years at Purdue as visiting faculty, he joined IBM Research in 1997, where he is a research staff member in the Component Systems Group and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Sanjiva's research interests are in component-oriented programming in general and specifically about component-oriented distributed computing architectures. He got involved with the Web services stack early by contributing to SOAP 1.1 and then by building the first implementation of it, which was later released to the Apache Software Foundation to start the Apache SOAP open source project. After that, Sanjiva cocreated WSDL (with Paco) and coauthored many Web services specifications, including WS-Addressing, WS-MetadataExchange, BPEL4WS, and WS-Resource Framework. In addition to developing specifications, Sanjiva has implemented many of them, in addition to technologies that are related to Web services, including Apache WSIF and the Web Services Gateway. He has been an active contributor to IBM's technical strategy for Web services and has helped coordinate IBM's Web services activities for the past five years. After Web services, Sanjiva's second love is open source, where he's a member of the Apache Software Foundation and the cofounder of the Lanka Software Foundation, an open source foundation in Sri Lanka. In his leisure time, he teaches at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where he lives and telecommutes to his job in New York.

Francisco Curbera is a research staff member and manager of the Component Systems Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, where he has worked since 1993. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University. His current research interests are in the use of component-oriented software in distributed computing system. In the past, he has worked in the design of algorithms and tools for processing XML documents, and in the use of markup languages for automatic UI generation. He has worked in different Web services specifications since the initial Web services concept surfaced in late 1999, first as one of the original authors of the Apache SOAP implementation of SOAP 1.1, and then as coauthor of WSDL 1.1, BPEL4WS, WS-Policy, and WS-PolicyAttachments, WS-Addressing, WS-MetadataExchange, and other Web services specifications. He currently represents IBM in the Web Services Addressing working group, standardizing WS-Addressing at the W3C, and in the Web Services Business Process technical committee standardizing BPEL4WS at OASIS.

Frank Leymann is a professor of computer science and the director of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include service-oriented computing, workflow and business process management, transaction processing, and architecture patterns. Before taking over as a professor, Frank worked for two decades at IBM Software Group in the development of database and middleware products. During that time, he built tools that support conceptual and physical database design for DB2, as well as performance prediction and monitoring, co-architected a repository system, built both a universal relation system and a complex object database system on top of DB2, and was coarchitect of the MQSeries family. In parallel to that, Frank has worked continuously since the late 1980s on workflow technology and has become the father of IBM's workflow product set. As an IBM Distinguished Engineer and