HP, IBM and Macromedia, among others, have formed a technical committee within OASIS to pursue the development of a component model for interactive web services.

Charles Wiecha of IBM, chair of the new OASIS WSCM Technical Committee, explains:

Right now, there is no industry standard mechanism for packaging the display component of a Web service. WSCM will enable any Web application--a package tracker, a calendar application, a stock quote, anything--to be delivered and displayed to an end user as a Web service, regardless of the underlying Web platform, vendor-specific application format or display device.

The new committee will consider contributions of work from other organizations, such as the Web Services User Interface initiative proposed earlier this year. IBM also intends to contribute its Web Services Experience Language to the effort.

It seems that the companies are intent on outmaneuvering either Microsoft's .NET or Sun's Java in order to provide another grand unification theory of distributed applications.