Web Services Flow Language

Web Services Flow Language, abbreviated WSFL and issued as version 1.0, was an XML-based language that IBM proposed in 2001 for describing how web services are composed into larger services. It covered two kinds of composition. The first described a business process as a collection of web services, and the second described the interactions between partners that take part in such a process. WSFL was designed to sit on top of the Web Services Description Language, so that the services it combined were described through that existing interface standard. Its main lasting importance is as one of the two sources of the later standard for web service orchestration. In 2003 IBM and Microsoft combined WSFL with Microsoft's Xlang to produce BPEL4WS and submitted that language to OASIS for standardization, and OASIS then published it under the name WS-BPEL so that it fitted the naming of other WS-star standards.