Date: Oct. 30, 2000
Link: http://www.xaml.org/
Source Author or Organization: XAML Initiative, Bowstreet, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Oracle Corporation,Sun Microsystems

XAML (Transaction Authority Markup Language) is designed to support the transactional semantics of the widely adopted standards for two-phase commit, XA (Transaction Authority).

XAML intends to provide a means for transaction supporting web services to participate in higher-level business transactions. Should a web service (such as a financing service to ensure payment according to vendor terms, or a transportation service to guarantee timely shipment/delivery of product) fail to commit its operation, XAML provides a protocol that allows a company to interact with other web services to cancel, compensate or find alternative actions.

The objectives of the XAML standard include: providing a specification for the XML message interfaces and interaction models of web services to support the coordination and processing of multi-stage transactions, specifying interfaces and protocols that preserve investment and strengths in transaction monitors and resources, and specifying interaction models for software systems to provide business-level transactions that coordinate the processing of multiple distributed web services.