The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) published today a critical Web standard for extending the features of Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, enabling developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing metadata, and other scenarios, in modular fashion.
Web Services Policy 1.5 allows SOA developers to extend a service without disruption or requiring changes to lower level service descriptions.
Years of customer experience with commercial Web services applications have made clear the need for a modular approach for describing required and optional extensions used by a service, according to the Consortium founded and headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web.
Without this capability, it can be costly to rewrite an entire service whenever application needs change and Web Services Policy 1.5 can reduce this cost, W3C pointed out.
The policy connects the core Web services standards -- SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0, and XML Schema -- to a growing set of extensions that reflect industry needs and experience.
Industry leaders including IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems have praised the new WS-1.5 policy.
"Customers deploying Web services based solutions with advanced quality of service characteristics (such as security) want to avoid the need for manual exchange of configuration information," Karla Norsworthy, Vice President, Software Standards, IBM commented. "The WS-Policy specifications facilitate interaction between producers and consumers of Web services within context of a Quality-of-Service policy. We supported the W3C in this effort by providing the WS-Policy Working Group co-chair, and a member of the Working Group editing team. IBM will offer support for these important standards in market leading products including WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli Federated Identity Manager and WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances."
"Many Web services specifications such as WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-RMPolicy, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Addressing Metadata and WS-MTOM Policy use WS-Policy to enable automatic and flexible use of key features such as security, reliability, transaction, addressing and message optimization," Andrew Layman, Partner Product Unit Manager, Microsoft Corporation noted. "Microsoft will continue its support of Web Services Policy by implementing the W3C Recommendation in the next version of its Web services-enabled products, including the forthcoming Windows Communication Foundation 3.5."
"Oracle is pleased to see WS-Policy progress to Recommendation status," Don Deutsch, Vice President Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle said."By allowing interactions between Web components to be tailored at runtime based on declarative specifications, WS-Policy promotes flexibility and enhances compatibility. We congratulate W3C on achieving this important milestone toward the delivery of a complete Web Services Standards stack."
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