Web Services in their simplest incarnation support only stateless communication between a requester and a provider. Many services are potentially long running, and contingencies for alternative service invocation or service failure have to be provided. For this reason, a number of Web Services Choreography standards are currently being developed, for instance BPEL or WS-C. We take a look at the current state of the standards field, and compare the history and outcome of the different standardization efforts. This is an exploratory case study, motivated by two observations. First, that the current interest in web services is directing attention to issues that have a longer history in the workflow community. Second, that the debate over web services choreography standards appears to be deeply influenced by architectural style, understood by relatively few. We started with one question – whether the technical debate has merit and should be better understood by a wider community. We also ask whether the battle is only about the technology. We found answers to both questions…

• zur Muehlen, Michael; Nickerson, Jeffrey V.; Swenson, Keith D.: Developing Web Services Choreography Standards – The Case of REST vs. SOAP. Decision Support Systems 40 (2005) 1, pp. 9-29.