What Is Web Services Coordination (WSC)?

They say, "If you want to make an omelet, you must break a few eggs." Maybe they don't say it that way, but you get the idea. What if you're doing more than just breaking eggs? What if you're trying to coordinate all of the parts of your business? The factors that all have to work together seamlessly for customers who deserve nothing less than the best experience ever WSC is here for you! Web Services Coordination (WSC) is a Web services specification that provides a framework to coordinate distributed application actions. It was developed by BEA Systems, Microsoft and IBM and is part of the Oasis Web Services Transaction. Often, the services defined by different vendors may simulate a single activity. For example, purchasing a product from eBay also utilizes the Web service from PayPal for payment. Hence, coordination between multiple services is essential to reduce business latency. WSC specifies coordination protocols that allow the user to identify constraints and negotiate an agreement on the acceptable outcome of activities. Coordination is thus the key to success. You know what they say: two heads are better than one or, in this case, a bunch of Web services working together to achieve a common goal. The WSC framework is a mechanism for specifying how several Web services integrate to achieve a common goal. The coordinator is the main component of the WSC framework. An application can create a coordination instance using an operation provided by the Activation Service. Once you have your coordinator, you can use it to coordinate other activities. For example, if you want to incorporate a distributed coordination feature into your app, you must implement the Registration Service but, first things first an activity needs to define a coordination context for the action to be monitored by your coordinator and its behavior needs to be specified during registration. You'll also need an Activation Service from another application for them to send over their acquired coordination context so that both activities can communicate with each other appropriately. Once all that's done? You're set! Now it's time for all your activities and, even more importantly, their coordinators to go out into the world and make something unique happen!