With support from Ascential Software, BEA Systems, Informatica, IONA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, and webMethods, HP has announced the publication of a Web Services Management Framework Version 2.0 and plans to contribute the specification set to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC. As published, WSMF contains three loosely coupled specifications that provide the necessary components of a management stack: WSMF-Foundation defines the base framework for management using Web services; WS-Events defines the Web services based event notification mechanism and is used by WSMF-Foundation; WSMF-Web Services Management defines the model for management of Web services. The distribution is available for download, and includes an Overview, three prose specifications in PDF, three XML schemas, and five WSDLs.

WSMF "is a logical architecture for the management of resources, including Web services themselves, through Web services. This framework is based on the notion of managed objects and their relationships. A managed object essentially represents a resource and exposes a set of management interfaces through which the underlying resource could be managed. Similarly, relationships among managed objects represent relationships among underlying resources. The framework defines how all IT resources in an adaptive enterprise can expose management information about themselves and how they can be managed. A management interface communicates immediate knowledge about changes in business processes and IT infrastructure whenever application and infrastructure events occur, and it gives companies the choice and flexibility to adopt future innovations and advance the management of their adaptive enterprise."

Bibliographic Information and Specification Abstracts

Web Services Management Framework (WSMF) 2.0 "is specified in three different specification documents: WSMF-Foundation defines the base framework for management using Web services. WS-Events defines the Web services based event notification mechanism. This mechanism is used by WSMF-Foundation. WSMF-Web Services Management defines the model for management of Web services." Key documents are references below.

• Overview

  Web Services Management Framework Overview (WSMF-Overview) Version 2.0. Edited by Pankaj Kumar (Hewlett-Packard Company). 16 July 2003. 20 pages. Authors: Nicolas Catania (Hewlett-Packard Company), Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard Company), Homayoun Pourhedari (Hewlett-Packard Company), William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard Company), Klaus Wurster (Hewlett-Packard Company).

  Web Services Management Framework (WSMF) is a logical architecture for the management of resources, including Web services themselves, through Web services. This framework is based on the notion of managed objects and their relationships. A managed object essentially represents a resource and exposes a set of management interfaces through which the underlying resource could be managed. Similarly, relationships among managed objects represent relationships among underlying resources. To better support the various Web service-managed domains, WSMF is model neutral and is designed to be applied to many different domains with varying management requirements. This is an overview document of a family of documents specifying basic mechanisms for management using Web services (WSMF-Foundation), a Web services-based event subsystem (WS-Events), and management of Web services (WSMF-WSM)."

  • WSMF-Overview Version 2.0
  • PDF format

• Web Services Events

  Web Services Events (WS-Events) Version 2.0. Edited by Nicolas Catania (Hewlett-Packard Company). 16 July 2003. 23 pages. Authors: Pankaj Kumar (Hewlett-Packard Company), Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard Company), Homayoun Pourhedari (Hewlett-Packard Company), William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard Company), and Klaus Wurster (Hewlett-Packard Company).

  "This document describes Web Services Events (WS-Events) Version 2.0, an XML syntax and a set of processing rules for advertising, subscribing, producing and consuming Web Services Events. An Event is an abstract concept that is physically represented by a Notification. Notifications flow from Event producer to Event consumer using asynchronous or synchronous delivery modes (push/pull)."

  • WS-Events 2.0 [cache]
  • WS-Events XML schema
  • WS-EventsWSDL

• Web Service Management Framework Foundation

  Web Service Management Framework: Foundation (WSMF-Foundation). Edited by Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard Company). Version 2.0. 16 July 2003. 44 pages. Authors: Nicolas Catania (Hewlett-Packard Company), Pankaj Kumar (Hewlett-Packard Company), Homayoun Pourhedari (Hewlett-Packard Company), William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard Company), and Klaus Wurster (Hewlett-Packard Company).

  "This specification describes how a manageable resource is exposed as a Web service. The Web Service Management Framework - Foundation (WSMF-Foundation) defines standard management interfaces for manageable resources as Web service operations. WSMF-Foundation describes how a manageable resource is discovered, how its management capabilities are described, how it is associated with other resources, and how to extend interfaces to address the management capabilities of resources in specific domains. This specification describes the foundation of the Web Services Management Framework. Additional specifications will describe applications of this framework to specific domains."

  • WSMF-Foundation 2.0 [cache]
  • WSMF-Foundation XML schema
  • WSMF-Foundation WSDL

• Web Services Management

  Web Services Management Framework: Web Services Management (WSMF-WSM) Version 2.0. Edited by William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard Company). 16 July 2003. 40 pages. Authors: Nicolas Catania (Hewlett-Packard Company), Pankaj Kumar (Hewlett-Packard Company), Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard Company), Homayoun Pourhedari (Hewlett-Packard Company), and Klaus Wurster (Hewlett-Packard Company).

  "Web Services Management Framework - Web Services Management (WSMF-WSM) is an application of the WSMF-Foundation specification for the management of Web Services. It contains a model defined for this purpose since there is currently no satisfying model available to manage web services. It also contains other mandatory instructions necessary to achieve efficient management of Web services through the use of WSMF. It uses the mechanisms described in WSMF-Foundation to describe a model that can be used to manage Web services. Like all models exposed by WSMF-Foundation, it is composed of managed objects, operations, attributes, relations and notifications. The managed objects defined in WSMF-WSM are fully compliant with the WSMF-Foundation specification. The managed objects identified by WSMF-WSM are Service, WSExecutionEnvironment, Conversation, Registry and Intermediary. Those fully specified in the current version of WSMF-WSM are Service, WSExecutionEnvironment and Conversation. The others are briefly described in the future directions section."

  • Web Services Management 2.0 [cache]
  • WSMF-WSM XML Schema
  • WSMF-WSM Conversation WSDL
  • WSMF-WSM Service WSDL
  • WSMF-WSM Execution environment WSDL

WSMF Overview

The Web Services Management Framework is a "management framework to provide a consistent and secure mechanism based on Web services for managing various types of resources, including Web services themselves. The framework takes advantage of the work being done to define the protocols and behavior around Web services and uses this infrastructure to perform management.

The term Web services is used to describe a new approach to distributed computing in which interactions are carried out through the exchange of XML messages. These messages are formatted and transported as per the binding specified in the Web service description document. This architecture allows Web services to be loosely-coupled and highly extensible. Due to these properties, Web services are rapidly emerging as the ubiquitous distributed programming infrastructure. Enterprises are adopting the Web services technology to address their business integration needs and, inevitably, existing management infrastructures need to be extended to manage these new deployments.

The extensibility and loose-coupling provided by Web services are important to the management solutions as well. Today, resources are managed using a variety of incompatible and often proprietary interfaces and protocols. Management information requirements need to be programmed as specific hooks to address new resources and in many cases these hooks are not updated as new versions of the IT resources become available. WSMF addresses this complex situation by defining a standard extensible interface for extraction of management information that makes use of Web services-based industry standardized protocol and description language. In doing so, it provides the advantages of a platform-independent protocol and will evolve to support more complex IT management issues as new standards are created for security, routing, discovery, federation, and others.

Currently, the mechanisms of WSMF are applied to address the management needs for Web services. In future, it will also be applied to additional management domains.

The WSMF architecture offers a way for current and future Web services specifications to provide management capabilities in a standard way. Hence, we use the word "framework" to collectively represent the management for all of these cooperative specifications.

Web services use a common set of middleware standards across diverse domains for allowing various parties to exchange data. The most prevalent use of Web services today is between businesses or inside enterprises to carry business processes and transactions. Any such environment should be managed in order to provide the security, usability, and reliability needed in today's business environment. Hence, use of tools and standards for security, collaborations, process flows, and management are necessary.

Currently there is no standard approach to managing Web services. What management vendors can offer is instrumentation at the SOAP end points and intermediaries (e.g. SOAP servers, UDDI servers, etc.). This will provide information about the Web services as they use these applications. However, this management view is incomplete and lacks critical information on the state of the Web service as it is executing and messages are traveling between various end points. For such information, Web services need to become much more manageable. [adapted from the Overview "Introduction"]

From the Announcement

With support from industry leaders such as Ascential Software, BEA Systems, Informatica, IONA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, Inc., and webMethods, among others, HP will make the framework specification available for public download and is delivering a call to action for other Web services-reliant companies to join the effort to create an industry standards-based solution for the management of, and through, Web services.

Enterprises demanding reduced information technology (IT) complexity and increased agility need to control access, track and measure service levels, collect usage data and, most importantly, ensure return on their IT investments. This can be achieved through an intelligently managed adaptive infrastructure that incorporates "built-in" Web services management within the design and deployment of their IT infrastructures. Developed by HP, with significant input from key partners, the Web Services Management Framework is a logical architecture for the management of resources, including Web services themselves, through Web services.

"HP is leading the development of open standards for Web services management by working with its partners to establish a management interface that is domain, platform and vendor neutral," said Mark Linesch, vice president, HP Adaptive Enterprise Program. "We're submitting this specification to OASIS to accelerate the adoption of common standards in Web services management and to simplify Web services development for our partners and customers today, while enabling them to plug into the adaptive enterprise of tomorrow."

The framework embraces standardization -- one of the four design principles in HP's Darwin Reference Architecture -- to provide customers and partners with a step-by-step approach to creating a business process-oriented IT environment that dynamically adjusts to business changes. The Darwin Reference architecture creates a tighter linkage between critical business processes and the supporting IT infrastructure and helps provide built-in manageability.

Model and platform neutral, the Web Services Management Framework is designed to be applied to many different domains with varying management requirements and allows for management of J2EE, .NET and other platforms. This allows it to better support important IT domains such as enterprise application integration, enterprise resource planning, software configuration management and Web services.

Leveraging its HP OpenView management software portfolio, HP has introduced for beta customers technologies that use HP's Web Services Management Framework for the adaptive enterprise, including the HP OpenView Web Services Management Engine and new Application Impact Analysis and Business Impact Analysis technologies.

About the HP Darwin Reference Architecture

"The Darwin Reference Architecture is a standards-based framework that leverages technology and components from HP and industry partners to create a new level of business and IT integration and lower IT acquisition and operating costs. The reference architecture is based on the premise that all components of the enterprise architecture should adhere to the following design principles:

• Simplification: Simplify existing IT environments through consolidation of underutilized assets and by ensuring management and control levers exist at all the layers of the environment -- infrastructure, applications and business processes. An infrastructure that contains fewer elements is easier to manage and therefor can deliver results faster and easier especially when executing changes.

• Standardization: Standards -- applied across processes, procedures, technologies and applications -- extend the benefits of simplification. According to the Darwin Reference Architecture, standardization can be achieved in many ways including: adopting industry standard-interfaces, which reduce communications overhead and speed change; establishing common processes and policies for managing change; and defining common requirements for manageability, security, collaboration, configuration management, and capacity and performance management.

• Modularity: Modularity in the context of the Darwin Reference Architecture applies both to physical networks of storage and servers and to the virtual resources they support. Modularity allows one aspect of a system to be changed without impacting any on the other components, leading to improved manageability and responsiveness. With modularity, storage and computing power can be dynamically scaled and redeployed to meet upward or downward processing requirements for individual applications or for entire business processes. Modularity helps to substantially reduce the time required to integrate, or separate, business systems.

• Integration: Eliminating artificial barriers between elements of the IT environment frees capacity of underutilized resources and promotes interoperability across the IT environment. By designing IT resources and systems for integration, the infrastructure can be managed holistically, linking the resources and elements of the IT environment back to the services that it provides to the business. [adapted from the 2003-05-06 announcement]