IBM alphaWorks Labs has released a new version of its Web Services Toolkit with support for the Web Services Security Specification (WS-Security) announced on 2002-04-11. Specifically, the v3.1 IBM WSTK additions "provide an implementation of SOAP Security Token and Digital Signature components of the WS-Security specification. The SOAP Security Token which indicates the message sender's properties (name, identity, credentials, and capabilities ) is passed with SOAP messages; this helps identify the message sender to the Web service provider. This modular technology is useful to Web service providers when they need to support users with different authentication mechanisms. It also enables Web services providers to incorporate additional security features to their Web services applications over time. Version 3.1 also features a Buyer-Seller demo, Business Explorer for Web Services, Web Services Management, WSDL Explorer, new utility services, WSIL4J, and support for the use of UDDI v2 registries. The Buyer-Seller demo uses various aspects of Web Services components such as WSDL, WS-Inspection, UDDI, AXIS, etc. in a standards-based J2EE runtime environment."

In addition to support for WS-Security, tools and technologies now available in WSTK 3.1 include:

• Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS) - This XML-based UDDI exploring engine provides application developers with standard interfaces to perform complex searches in multiple UDDI directories using a single query request.
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer - A browser-based tool that generates an automatic user interface for helping users examine a WSDL document to understand, discover and invoke available Web services.
• Web Services Management - Management technology which illustrates an approach to managing Web services by providing a Java Management Extensions (JMX) -based systems management interface.
• Buyer-Seller Web Services Demo - The demo combines Web services and standardized business documents to show an end-to-end purchase of electronics components; it illustrates the use of Web services technologies in a simulated environment where a basic end-to-end business transaction is implemented.