Where are the composite app standards?

In reading about composite applications, I was surprised to see how little work in terms of open source and open standards is being done in this area. I found the following standards:

• XForms for web based forms
• BPEL for orchestration
  
• WS-CAF from OASIS has only released one part of 3 planned standards.
  
• and of course the whole raft of web services standards
  

Missing are standards for:

• Screen flow, i.e. controlling the order of screens presented to the user.
• Work flow in terms of transferring work between people (the so called BPEL4People standard has yet to be published and maybe is not what we want.
• Screen layout.
• Packing all the bits of a composite app together so that it can be shipped (similar to web apps today).
  

All this is available in propriety products, which makes me surprised to find that nobody is working on standards in this area and even more surprised that nobody is working on an open source version of a composite application framework.

Will the real composite app please stand up

In trying to get to grips with what is meant by a composite application I came across this blog entry from Jeff Calow of IBM. He writes that the usual definitions of composite applications all deal with automation, but then asks about the user interface aspects. I would like to extend this and assert that a composite application consists of three optional aspects:

• A user interface which brings together in one place everything the user needs to carry out a task. This could be a portal or a scripted front end as found in many mashups . Rich clients are another possibility.
  
• A business process execution environment that not only handles the automation of processes, but also deals with user centric aspects such as workflow and screenflow.
  
• An integration infrastructure that allows data to be transformed from one format to another.
  

IMHO any self respecting composite application framework should support all three aspects.