| Last modified: November 13, 2010 |
| Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) |
Overview
Update November 10, 2010. WS-I announced that after nearly a decade of work and industry cooperation has successfully concluded its charter to document best practices for Web services interoperability across multiple platforms, operating systems and programming languages. The release of WS-I member approved final materials [...] fulfills WS-I's last milestone as an organization. By publishing the final three profiles, WS-I marks the completion of its work. Stewardship over WS-I's assets, operations and mission will transition to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a group of technology vendors and customers that drive development and adoption of open standards. Since 2002, WS-I has developed profiles, sample applications, and testing tools to facilitate Web services interoperability. These building blocks have in turn served as the basis for interoperability in the cloud. Companies from across the industry have collaborated to build an interoperable Web services foundation that will benefit customers well into the future..."
An OASIS Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) Member Section has been created, with publicly accessible discussion list archives, membership list, etc. "The OASIS WS-I Member Section facilitates the creation and operation of an environment made up of customers and vendors in support of delivering interoperability guidance and testing of SOAP-based Web services that often goes beyond individual specification testing. The Member Section will provide coordination of any Technical Committees under its umbrella and various adoption and marketing activities it may choose to undertake. It will also provide the governance structure to accept and and manage funds."
[February 07, 2002] IBM and Microsoft, together with an additional fifty-three(+) industry leaders, have formed a new Web Services Interoperability Organization "committed to promoting interoperability among Web services based on common, industry-accepted definitions and related XML standards support. WS-I brings the work of multiple standards development organizations together for the purpose of providing clarity and conformance around Web Services." WS-I working groups will be chartered to produce specific sets of deliverables such as testing tools and sample Web services. These deliverables will be targeted at providing resources to assist Web services developers "to create interoperable Web services, and to verify that their results are compliant with both industry standards and WS-I recommended guidelines." Key deliverables include (1) Profiles, which identify version-specific sets of Web services specifications that interoperate to support specific types of solutions; (2) Sample Implementations exposing interoperability issues; (3) Implementation Guidelines with implementation scenarios, sample solutions, and test cases illustrating compliance verification; (4) A 'Sniffer' tool to monitor and log interactions with a Web service; (5) An 'Analyzer' conformance testing tool which processes sniffer logs to verify that the Web service implementation is error-free. WS-I is open to any organization supporting the goal of interoperable Web services. See the news item.
"WS-I is an open, industry organization chartered to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. The organization works across the industry and standards organizations to respond to customer needs by providing guidance, best practices, and resources for developing Web services solutions." [Website home page 2002-02-07]
Overview: "The technology industry's rapidly growing interest in XML-based Web services -- which allow people to access and integrate information from throughout the Web, seamlessly and securely -- got a boost today with the announcement that Microsoft, IBM and other leading technology companies have formed a cross-industry initiative, the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization. The focus of the WS-I -- whose founders also include Accenture, BEA Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, -- is to promote a key technology for what Microsoft has called the next generation of the Internet... The organization is dedicated to two key goals. First, WS-I wants to provide implementation guidance and education to accelerate customer deployments. Second, it will articulate and promote a common industry vision for Web-services interoperability to ease customer decision making, to grow market adoption of Web services and to ensure the continued evolution of Web services technologies... [Testing:] Part of what's driven Web services until now has been a growing baseline of Web-services standards, including SOAP 1.1, XML Schema, WSDL 1.1 and UDDI. The WS-I will encourage a set of best practices around these standards. It will also deliver a set of compliance tools that customers can use to test their baseline implementations of the standards. The tests will be voluntary, self-administered and aimed at discovering errors in implementation of the specifications so they can be corrected. We want to make it easier for customers to improve the interoperability of their infrastructure and applications... [Profiles:] WS-I will aggregate collections of key Web services standards into meaningful groups that are easier for customers to work with. It will also promote the evolutionary adoption of key standards, and evolve the scope and definition of profiles as required by market needs and the maturity of underlying standards. Web services, and the market for them, must grow and evolve together. Web-services profiles will help that happen... [Roadmap: The "Web Services Framework" document published by IBM and Microsoft] will serve as the foundation for the new roadmap, an evolving document that will identify functional areas and capabilities to be addressed by future Web services specifications. The roadmap will guide implementers and customers so that their work can remain compatible with the specifications as they are developed." [from the interview with Dan'l Lewin 2002-02-06]
Initiative rationale: "SOAP 1.2, WSDL 1.1, and UDDI 2.0 are the latest specifications that are used to describe, publish, enable discovery, and invoke Web Services [but they are only] the beginning of the design and creation of specifications and standards to support the full Web services vision. For example, additional work is necessary for message extensibility, binary attachments, routing, correlation, guaranteed message exchange, signatures, encryption, transactions, process flow, inspection, and discovery... even though the industry may have the best intentions of ensuring interoperability on a specification by specification basis, a CIO, purchaser or other user of a Web service product (be it a tool, runtime, or web service itself) would find it very difficult to match several pieces of software necessary to complete a task or build a solution. The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) addresses this need through the concept of 'Profiles'..."
"One of the challenges to achieving the interoperability promise of Web services is that the specifications for the first generation of Web services: Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Service Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), currently are overseen by a number of independent standards bodies making coordination of the various specifications difficult. Additionally, use of the same specifications does not always ensure that the resulting Web services will interoperate with Web services created on other platforms or with different programming languages. As the number and variety of specifications increases to match new and existing needs this problem only increases. To truly realize the promise of interoperability it is imperative that industry leadership in regards to definition, implementation, and testing of Web services be brought forward. The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), founded by Microsoft, International Business Machines (IBM) and other leaders in the software and technology industries, is an organization committed to promoting interoperability among Web services based on common, industry-accepted definitions and related XML standards support. WS-I will provide the guidance, tools, and test materials necessary to ensure that Web services created using industry standards will interoperate with one another -- across different platforms, applications, and programming languages. By working with industry leaders and standards bodies, WS-I will help advance Web services in a structured, coherent fashion..." [from the MS document "Web Services: Interoperability Across Platforms, Applications, and Programming Languages."
A WS-I Profile is "a named group of Web services specifications at specific version levels, along with conventions about how they work together. WS-I will develop a core collection of profiles that support interoperability for general purpose Web services functionality. Profiles make it easier to discuss Web services interoperability at a level of granularity that makes sense for developers, users, and executives making investment decisions about Web services and Web services products. WS-I focuses on compatibility at both the individual specification and at the Profile level. To be a useful concept and avoid confusion, the number of Profiles should remain relatively small. At the same time, too few profiles would require some Web services products to be forced to add unneeded features simply to conform to some Profile and assert interoperability. It will be an ongoing task of WS-I to design and update profiles that reflect real Web services usage in the industry... The first profile proposed is WS-I Basic (XML Schema 1.0, SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 1.0)... The development of additional or updated WS-I Profiles depends on the continued evolution and maturity of Web services specifications and standards. Each of the areas listed in the beginning of this paper is a candidate for additional Profile work as specifications are developed. Additional work in message extensibility, binary attachments, routing, correlation, guaranteed message exchange, signatures, encryption, transactions, process flow, inspection, and discovery is expected."
WS-I Test Resources
[July 29, 2003] "Using the WS-I Test Tools." By Yasser Shohoud (Microsoft). July 24, 2003. 18 minutes. Tutorial prepared as an MSDN TV Episode; the presentations is played using the Microsoft Windows Media Player. Summary: "The Web Services Interoperability organization (WS-I) has published a draft version of the Basic Profile Test Tools. Yasser Shohoud shows how to use these tools to test your Web service for WS-I Basic Profile conformance." Details: A Beta Release of the WS-I Testing Tools was issued in April 2003 and is available in C# and Java. The WS-I testing tools are designed to help developers determine whether their Web services are conformant with Profile Guidelines. The WS-I Testing Working Group also published draft [June 26, 2003] versions of the WS-I Monitor Tool Functional Specification and WS-I Analyzer Tool Functional Specification. The WS-I Monitor Tool specification edited by Scott Seely (Microsoft) documents the message capture and logging tool. "This tool captures messages and stores them for later analysis. The tool itself will have to capture messages traveling over different protocols and transports. The first version of this tool will focus on being able to accurately capture HTTP based SOAP messages. Also, while many interception techniques are available, this implementation uses a man in the middle approach to intercept and record messages... The Monitor has two distinct sets of functionality: (1) It is responsible for sending messages on to some other endpoint that is capable of accepting the traffic while preserving the integrity of communication between the two endpoints. (2) It is responsible for recording the messages that flow through it to a log file. One can think of these two pieces as an interceptor and a logger. For this first version of the Monitor, the interceptor and logger functionality will exist in the same application. The working group recognizes that we may later desire to separate the interceptor and the logger into two, standalone entities. This design discusses how one would go about structuring an application today that should be able to be broken into separate pieces in future versions..." The WS-I Analyzer Tool specification edited by Peter Brittenham (IBM) documents "the design for Version 1.0 of the analyzer tool, which will be used for conformance testing of WS-I profiles. The purpose of the Analyzer tool is to validate the messages that were sent to and from a Web service. The analyzer is also responsible for verifying the description of the Web service. This includes the WSDL document that describes the Web service, and the XML schema files that describe the data types used in the WSDL service definition. The analyzer tool has a defined set of input files, all of which are used to verify conformance to a profile definition: Analyzer configuration file; Test assertion definition file; Message log file; WSDL for the Web service. The analyzer configuration file and test assertion definition file are described in greater detail in the subsequent sections of the document; the message log file contains the list of messages that were captured by the monitor tool..." See also the WS-I Basic Profile Version 1.0 (Working Group Approval Draft 2003/05/20) and the
WS-I Testing Working Group Charter.
- Monitoring tools: 'Sniffer' will be provided to collect Web service message traces and generate a log for subsequent service message traces
- Analysis tools: 'Analyzer' will examine traces for correctness and use of recommended practices
- Output of analysis tools is used as a basis for WS-I compliance claims
- Tools are intended for use by any Web service developer
- Source code will be available
From the announcement:
Implementation Tools and Guidance: "To assist in ensuring the interoperability of Web services, WS-I will initially create a suite of tools and materials for testing implementation and conformance with "basic level" Web services standards: XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. These testing capabilities are important so customers can ensure that their implementations comply with the best-practices use of these Web services specifications. Tests will be self administered and aimed at uncovering unconventional usage or errors in specification implementations, thus improving interoperability between applications and across platforms.
Road Map for Web Services: "As Web services mature and gain mainstream momentum, the need will arise for additional capabilities that are not fully addressed in the current Web services standards. To meet these needs, WS-I will publish an architectural road map for identifying functional areas and capabilities that need to be addressed in future Web services specifications. As new specifications are created and adopted by multiple standards organizations to enhance current Web service capabilities, WS-I will provide a forum to ensure testing materials support the evolving set of requirements and their interdependencies."
WS-I membership and governance
Details as portrayed through documents in a WS-I 'membership information' packet distributed via email 2002-02-18, by WS-I Coordinator (Rich Crithfield). See the official contact address for current details on WS-I membership and organizational process.
- WS-I Bylaws. 19 pages.
- WS-I Membership Agreement. 9 pages.
- WS-I IPR Agreement. 28 pages.
- WS-I Membership Invitation. 1 page.
- Member Info/Contact. 1 page.
- New Member Checklist. 2 pages.
- Original 2002-02-18 distribution
WS-I Working Group Charters
Charters 2002-06:
- WSBasic Profile WG Charter. Scope of work and deliverables for the WS-I WSBasic Profile Working Group. [cache]
- WSBasic Sample Apps WG Charter. Scope of work and deliverables for the WS-I WSBasic Sample Applications and Scenarios Working Group. [cache]
- Testing WG Charter. Scope of work and deliverables for the WS-Testing Working Group. [cache]
WS-I Board Of Directors
[Website listing 2002-07-18]
- President and Chairman: Tom Glover - IBM
- Secretary: Christopher Kurt - Microsoft
- Treasurer: Jim Hughes - Hewlett-Packard
- Board Member: Ed Cobb - BEA Systems
- Board Member: Mike De Nicola - Fujitsu
- Board Member: Don Deutsch - Oracle
- Board Member: Franz-Josef Fritz - SAP AG
- Board Member: Norbert Mikula - Intel
- Board Member: Tony Roby - Accenture
WS-I Members
The WS-I members include some 107 companies [2002-07-18 listing]: 101communications, Accenture, Actional, Agentis Software, Akamai Technologies, Altova, Approva, Ascential Software, AT&T, Attachmate, Autodesk, Avinon, Bang Networks, BEA Systems, Blue Titan, Borland, Bowstreet, Business Objects, Cape Clear, CIGNA, CommerceQuest, ContentGuard, Corechange, Corel, Corillian, Cotagesoft, Cyclone Commerce, Daimler Chrysler, DealEasy, Discrete Objects, E2open, EDS, Epicentric, Epicor, ESRI, FileNET, Flamenco Networks, Forum Systems, Fox Island Partners, Fujitsu, FullTilt, Geac Computer Corporation, GrandCentral, Groove Networks, Hewlett-Packard, HighJump Software, Hitachi, Hummingbird Limited, I/O Software, IBM Corporation, Intel, Iona, iWay Software, JamCracker, KANA, Kinzan, Loudcloud, Mediapps, Mercator, Metapa, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Mogul Technology, NEON Systems, Netegrity, Onyx, Oracle Corporation, Parasoft, Partnerware, Pivotal, Plumtree, Portera, POSC, Procter & Gamble, Promon IP, Quovadx, Qwest, Rational Software, Reactivity, RealNames, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sabre, SAP AG, SAS, SeguriDATA, SilverStream Software, Softronic, Software AG, Sonic Software, Suntail, Swingtide, Sybase, Systinet, Talking Blocks, Tata Consultancy Services, TIBCO, Tryllian, Unisys, United Airlines, United Kingdom Office of e-Envoy, Verisign, Versata, Vinsurance, Vitria, webMethods, and WRQ
[June 27, 2002] WS-I as a "standards organization"? IBM's Bob Sutor says not, according to a Tech Update from Eric Knorr (June 27, 2002). On July 27, 2002, IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign announced their intention to submit the "Web Services Security Specification (WS-Security)" to OASIS and to create an OASIS Technical Committee for development of this specification. From Knorr's report: "According to Sutor, another message sent by WS-Security's choice of OASIS was to quell speculation once and for all that the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization will go beyond its current charter -- fostering Web services compatibility across tools and platforms -- to becoming a standards organization itself. 'The WS-I is about interoperability,' he says. 'There's been confusion generated -- I don't know why -- about whether it's doing standards or not, but we've always said it's not [emph added]. They've been very busy working on the interoperability of the basic things. I would hope and expect that at a later date they start looking at WS-Security'..." See details of the WS-Security submission to OASIS in "IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign Submit WS-Security Specification to OASIS for Standardization. Advanced Web Services Security Specification Broadly Supported by Industry." The report also highlights the significance of Sun's (stated) commitment to the WS-Security specification within the OASIS context: "Just as important as the players involved, however, is the decision by Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign to ensure WS-Security will be royalty-free. Explicitly, no party will be able to collect licensing fees from the use of WS-Security, a stipulation that Smith told me was a prerequisite for Sun's participation. He believes the proposed royalty-free license is 'sufficient in all regards. Had they not done that, we would not have participated'..."
Principal References
- WS-I web site
- "WS-I Board of Directors Releases Three WS-I Approval Draft Profiles for Review."
- Basic Security Profile Version 1.0. May 12, 2004. See the news story.
- WS-I Security Scenarios. WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group. Working Group Draft. Version 0.15. February 14, 2004. 52 pages. See the news story.
- "Basic Profile Version 1.0." Board Approval Draft. Date: 2003/03/28. Edited by Keith Ballinger (Microsoft), David Ehnebuske (IBM), Martin Gudgin (Microsoft), Mark Nottingham (BEA Systems), and Prasad Yendluri (webMethods). Revision URL: http://www.ws-i.org/Profiles/Basic/2003-03/BasicProfile-1.0-BdAD.html.
- Basic Profile Version 1.0 Working Group Draft. 2002-10-18. Also in PDF format.
- Announcement 2003-04-01: "WS-I Charters Basic Security Profile Working Group. Industry Organization Tackles Interoperability Issues with Web Services Security."
- "IBM and Microsoft Announce Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)." News item 2002-02-07.
- "Sample Application Supply Chain Management Architecture." [cache]
- "Supply Chain Management Use Case Model." [cache]
- "WS-I Usage Scenarios." [cache]
- "WS-I Overview." Version 1.3. October 03, 2002. [cache 2002-10-19]
- Announcement 2002-02-06: "Industry Leaders Align Around Web Services Interoperability. Accenture, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP Form Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to Speed Development and Deployment of Web Services. Provide Support and Road Map for Developers and Customers."
- Announcement from IBM. February 07, 2002. "Industry Leaders Align Around Web Services Interoperability."
- WS-I FAQ document
- WS-I Profiles. 2 pages. "Profiles are a mechanism used to group sets of Web service specifications to provide specific functionality. They provide the context for WS-I technical activities. This document introduces the concept of Web service profiles." Also in Word/.DOC format.
- WS-I overview
- WS-I news and events
- WS-I members
- WS-I documentation
- WS-I implementation tools
- "Web Services: Interoperability Across Platforms, Applications, and Programming Languages." From Microsoft. February 6, 2002.
- "Q&A: Web Services Interoperability Organization to Promote Interoperability." From Microsoft PressPass and Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft Vice President. February 6, 2002.
- Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization. References from Microsoft web site.
- "Web Services Framework." WS-I will "adopt and publish a roadmap expanding upon the one defined in the 'Web Services Framework' whitepaper, jointly submitted by IBM and Microsoft to the W3C in April 2001." [cache]
- Contact: info@ws-i.org
Articles, Papers, News, Tools
[November 10, 2010] "WS-I Completes Web Services Interoperability Standards Work." By Michael Champion. Blog. "The final three Web services profiles developed by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) have been approved by WS-I's membership. Approval of the final materials for Basic Profile (BP) 1.2 and 2.0, and Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) 1.0 marks the completion of the organization's work. Since 2002, WS-I has developed profiles, sample applications, and testinimageg tools to facilitate Web services interoperability... It took a lot of work to get real products to fully interoperate using the standards. WS-I members have delivered an impressive body of work supporting deliverables in addition to the profiles (test tools, assertions, etc.). One might ask 'why did it take so long, and what exactly did all this hard work entail?' When WS-I started up, interoperability of the whole stack of XML standards was fragile, especially of the SOAP and WSDL specifications at the top of the stack. It was possible for a specification to become a recognized standard with relatively little hard data about whether implementations of the specs interoperated. Specs were written in language that could get agreement by committees rather than in terms of rigorous assertions about formats and protocols as they are used in conjunction with one another in realistic scenarios. In other words, the testing that was done before a spec became a standard was largely focused on determining whether the spec could be implemented in an interoperable way, and not on whether actual implementations interoperated. At WS-I the web services community learned how to do this better. One of the first tasks was to develop profiles of the core specifications that turned specification language containing 'MAY' and 'SHOULD' descriptions of what is possible or desirable to 'MUST' statements of what is necessary for interoperability, and removing altogether the features that weren't widely implemented. We learned that it is important to do N-way tests of all features in a profile across multiple implementations, and not just piecewise testing of shared features... This work was particularly tedious and unglamorous over the last few years, when the WS-* technologies are no longer hot buzzwords. But now, partly due to the growing popularity of test driven development in the software industry as a whole, but partly due to the hard-won lessons from WS-I, the best practices noted above are commonplace. Later versions of specifications, especially SOAP 1.2, explicitly incorporated the lessons learned in the Basic Profile work at WS-I. Other Standards Development Organization (SDO) such as OASIS and W3C have applied the techniques pioneered at WS-I, and newer standards are more rigorously specified... Microsoft and the other companies who did the work at WS-I learned a lot more about how to get our mutual customers applications to interoperate across our platforms than could be contained in the WS-I documents that were just released. And to support this effort we are compiling additional guidance under a dedicated website..."
[November 10, 2010] "Through the WS-I, We Built a Solid Foundation for Achieving, Extending Interoperability." By Paul Cotton. Blog. Posted to Microsoft on the Issues. "Roughly 10 years ago, a handful of hardware and software vendors met to discuss the concept of Web services interoperability. Outside of e-mail, the internet had yet to be adopted into mainstream use, but the industry recognized its potential as a vehicle for relaying data between different software programs or operating platforms — such as a Windows PC and an IBM mainframe. This need for the free flow of information across different platforms and programs motivated Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, HP and a handful of other vendors to form the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Their goal was to codify the requirements to achieve interoperability, by creating a series of blue prints (or, profiles) that developers and engineers could follow whenever they write a software program.... Today we have interoperability profiles based on standardized versions of the specifications, customers have specs that they can point to, the industry has broad agreement on the approach to take to achieve interoperability, and vendors have work they can point to that demonstrates interoperability. We've also mastered the process of writing specifications to the point that technology implementers can create an interoperable software program on their first attempt... Prior to WS-I, vendors were more accustomed to writing code that typically would not interact with other vendors' products. It's one thing to write an informal, 50-60 page specification that will only be used within your company. But an entirely different set of requirements come into play when you're writing specs for use by multiple parties. This called for a much more prescriptive approach to how programmers write code. Together, we identified the requirements and spelled out specifics for code that would ensure interoperability..."
[November 10, 2010] "WS-I Completes Web Services Interoperability Standards Work. Industry Collaboration Enables Interoperability in the Cloud." WS-I Announcement. "After nearly a decade of work and industry cooperation, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I http://www.ws-i.org) has successfully concluded its charter to document best practices for Web services interoperability across multiple platforms, operating systems and programming languages. The release of WS-I member approved final materials for Basic Profile (BP) 1.2 and [Basic Profile] 2.0, and Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) 1.0 fulfills WS-I's last milestone as an organization. By publishing the final three profiles, WS-I marks the completion of its work. Stewardship over WS-I's assets, operations and mission will transition to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a group of technology vendors and customers that drive development and adoption of open standards. Since 2002, WS-I has developed profiles, sample applications, and testing tools to facilitate Web services interoperability. These building blocks have in turn served as the basis for interoperability in the cloud. Companies from across the industry have collaborated to build an interoperable Web services foundation that will benefit customers well into the future.
Today's announcement is 'gratifying,' said Steve Holbrook, Chair of the WS-I Board of Directors. 'Each member of WS-I has contributed to this massive and lengthy undertaking for the benefit of the greater Web community. This work was only possible through the cooperation, commitment and shared vision of each WS-I member organization.' ... Now that WS-I has achieved the goals it initially outlined in 2002, it is ready to transition ongoing maintenance of profiles to OASIS. 'WS-I's significant contribution to Web services interoperability will continue to play a vital role in the future of IT, especially with regard to cloud computing, where safe and reliable access to information is a requirement. As WS-I completes its transition to OASIS, we look forward not only to safeguarding their accomplishments but also to advancing their mission,' said Laurent Liscia, Executive Director of OASIS... Supportive statements and testimonials from Board member companies are available [online]..."
[December 15, 2008] Announcement 2008-12-08. — The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has published a case study that describes how its Profiles enabled the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) to develop the interoperable, secure set of cross-supply-chain process templates that Ford Motor Company required. WS-I is an open industry organization chartered to establish Best Practices for Web services interoperability. The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) is a not-for-profit association serving the automotive industry, with 1100 members from around the world. Ford is an American multinational corporation and the world's fourth-largest automaker. The deliverables created for Ford are available through AIAG to all of its members... Ford was seeking to establish reliable information channels and processes that would work across their entire supply chain. Ford approached AIAG with the goal of developing processes that would be interoperable and secure for all points in the supply chain, not only inside Ford. Ford wanted to be able to plug securely into a service architecture designed for business-tobusiness use: an approach that would work between and among organizations, versus a collection of proprietary technologies for individual members of the supply chain. Upon investigation, a Web services implementation promised the best combination of security, reliability, integration ease and service orientation, and the decision was made to employ WS-I Profiles. An AIAG Work Group, co-chaired by Faisal Waris from Ford and composed of people from organizations that included Ford, General Motors, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, iConnect, Axway, NIST and Wipro, proceeded in stages: first the proof of concept, an inventory management project; second, adding additional capacity to the transport layer; and third, involving more vendors, a Kanban implementation that first used simple Web services, then applied more advanced specifications... Today, Ford's enterprise policies require WS-I Profile conformance for Web services implementations. The company is now using WS-I profiles in the development of business-tobusiness production processes..."
[July 15, 2008] ISO Publishes Three WS-I Profiles. Announcement 2008-07-15: "Three WS-I Profiles Become ISO International Standards. ISO Publishes Web Services Interoperability Organization's Basic Profile, Attachments Profile, and Simple SOAP Binding Profile." — The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced that three of its Profiles — Basic Profile Version 1.1, Attachments Profile Version 1.0, and Simple SOAP Binding Profile Version 1.0 — have been published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 29361:2008, ISO/IEC 29362:2008, and ISO/IEC 29363:2008. The Profiles are available now for download from the ISO web site, and (for free) from the WS-I web site. WS-I's Basic Profile 1.1 provides interoperability guidance for a core set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, along with interoperability-promoting clarifications and amendments to those specifications; Attachments Profile 1.0 complements the Basic Profile to add support for interoperable SOAP Messages with attachments-based Web services; and the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 consists of the Basic Profile requirements related to the serialization of the envelope and its representation in the message. The three Profiles now published as ISO standards were submitted by WS-I to ISO's JTC1, the joint technical committee (with IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission) that deals with international information technology standards. Following comprehensive internal review and favorable consensus, JTC1 submitted the Profiles to ISO members for final approval as international standards, which required a two-thirds positive vote. The process to publish this set of WS-I Profiles as international standards involved rigorous review and voting by ISO members, which are the national standards bodies of 157 countries all over the world, each with one vote. The ISO designation is by no means automatically awarded: during ISO development and approval, a standard can be modified, augmented or even rejected. WS-I is an open, non-profit industry organization chartered to promote best practices for deploying secure, interoperable Web services across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. It comprises a diverse community of Web services leaders from a wide range of companies and standards development organizations (SDOs). WS-I committees and working groups create Profiles and supporting Testing Tools based on Best Practices for selected sets of Web services standards. The Profiles and Testing Tools are available for use by the Web Services community to aid in developing and deploying interoperable Web services. WS-I also submits selected deliverables to standards bodies for eventual publication as international standards. WS-I deliverables may be downloaded at no charge...
[July 03, 2008] "WSO2 Offers Open Source SOA Lifecycle Management." By Vance McCarthy. From Integration Developer News. "WSO2, the open source SOA company, is shipping its WSO2 Registry upgrade as Open Source. WSO2 Registry v1.1 adds out-of-the-box, SOA lifecycle management, and adds features that allow users to encode their own custom SOA Governance rules and policies. WSO2 Registry also sports a socially-enabled Web 2.0-type interface to make it easier to collaborate in managing, ranking and reusing enterprise Web services, said company execs. As well as being offered as standalone product, the WSO2 Registry upgrade is also available integrated with its Open Source WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 1.7. WSO2 Registry 1.1 also provides extension points that provide a flexible, plug-in approach to linking resources and allowing users to encode their own governance rules and polices. WSO2 Registry 1.1 also includes: (1) Transactional API support to allow activities to be grouped into atomic, consistent isolated and durable (ACID) transactions to guarantee reliable processing. (2) Dependency views, so users can track reliance graphs between resources and analyze the impact of changes on dependents. (3) WSDL validation, including validation of the WS-I Basic Profile specification, to ensure interoperability. (4) Enhanced search capabilities to make it easier to search based on tags or advanced criteria. (5) Enhanced API, so the Registry to be embedded in runtime systems and support automated SOA Governance...
[July 03, 2008] "Easily Test Web Services with soapUI." By Tony Patton. From TechRepublic.com Blog. July 03, 2008. [soapUI is Free and Open Source and is used for Inspecting Web Services, Invoking Web Services, Developing Web Services, Web Service Simulation and Web Service Mocking and Functional Testing of Web Services Load Testing of Web Services over HTTP.] "The soapUI is designed to simplify the testing of your Web services; I also find it useful for interacting with third-party Web services to get a better idea of what to expect in the response, as well as what to include in the response. It was especially useful in a recent project utilizing ChannelAdvisor Web services. Using soapUI, I was able to figure out the data expected in request objects. SoapUI is accessible to both technical and nontechnical persons. The easy-to-use graphical interface makes it simple to work with WSDL and SOAP-based Web services. It provides a Web service client that can automatically generate Web service requests and tests. With the tool, you can work with XML and its many variations like WSDL. WSDL is easily imported via its URL, along with a great viewer for navigating and inspecting the WSDL source. SoapUI offers extensive security features, which include Web service authentication and WS-Security. One of the cool features I like is the excellent SOAP monitor support; it allows you to easily monitor and analyze traffic... SoapUI easily integrates with IDEs and other tools to become a part of your development process. The list of IDEs includes Maven, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, JBoss, and Eclipse. The other tools include code generation and WS-I options... the Basic version is available at no cost. A Pro version is available with a one year license for $349. The professional version includes everything that's in the Basic version, along with product support and additional features for testing such as refactoring, data sources, and drag-and-drop editing.
[June 27, 2008] WS-I Reliable Secure Profile Version 1.0. Edited by J. Durand, A. Karmarkar, G. Pilz. WS-I Working Group Draft. Members of the WS-I Reliable Secure Profile Working Group have released a public working draft for "Reliable Secure Profile Version 1.0." This document defines the WS-I Reliable Secure Profile 1.0, consisting of a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, along with clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability. This Profile is intended to be composed with the WS-I Basic Profile 1.2, WS-I Basic Profile 2.0, WS-I Basic Security Profile 1.0, and WS-I Basic Security Profile 1.1. Composability of Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) with the previously mentioned profiles offers the following guarantee to users: conformance of an artifact to RSP does not prevent conformance of this artifact to these other profiles, and vice-versa. It treats "reliable secure" messaging with reference to specifications for Reliable Messaging, Secure Conversation, MakeConnection, and Secure Reliable Messaging. It incorporates by reference the relevant specifications published by IETF, OASIS, and W3C, as documented in Appendix A 'Referenced Specifications': (1) Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-ReliableMessaging) 1.1; (2) Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs); (3) Web Services Addressing 1.0 - SOAP Binding; (4) WS-SecureConversation 1.3; (5) Web Services Make Connection 1.0; (6) WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2. Section 1 "Introduction" introduces the Profile, and explains its relationships to other profiles. Section 2 "Profile Conformance" explains what it means to be conformant to the Profile. Each subsequent section addresses a component of the Profile, and consists of two parts; an overview detailing the component specifications and their extensibility points, followed by subsections that address individual parts of the component specifications.
[June 20, 2008] "Make Use of WS-I Resources to Test for Web Service Interoperability." By Klaus Berg. Java World Blog (June 20, 2008). "In theory, Web services are especially designed to offer "reusable" features that are discovered and bound at runtime using technical "loose coupling." The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has been formed expressly to help speed the creation and adoption of integrated, interoperable business applications based on open source. The OSA recommends that each vendor or project lead should carefully think about which functions in their to need to be triggered by other applications, and ensure that they are exposed in a loosely coupled way so customers and integrators can take care of implementing the process. These functions should be exposed as a service and should be implementation language neutral, so for example a PHP application can invoke a feature in a Java application. Having in mind that Web services are used by consumers unknown at design-time, and looking at the "Publish-Discover-Invoke-Paradigm" based on standards it will become evident that Web services are fundamentally about "interoperability". In reality, however, the "standard" protocols are not standard enough to ensure automatic interoperability... WS-I is an open industry organization "chartered to establish Best Practices for Web services interoperability, for selected groups of Web services standards, across platforms, operating systems and programming languages". The organization is a consortium of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices, and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services in the SOA world... WS-I testing tools are used to determine whether the messages exchanged with a Web service conform to WS-I guidelines. These tools monitor the messages and analyze the resulting log to identify any known issues, thus improving interoperability between applications and across platforms. Together with the tools WS-I offers: Implementation and testing guidance with respect to interoperability, sample programs, and, of course, Web service profiles. WS-I Profiles are addressing the interoperability issues by prescribing a set of specifications or standards at specific version levels, and by adding guidelines and conventions for using these specifications together. The most fundamental profile is the Basic Profile (BP), which addresses the integration of the following specifications and standards: SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML Schema, XML 1.0 (Second Edition), HTTP 1.1, TLS 1.0 or SSL 3.0 (HTTPS). More than 200 interoperability issues have been resolved by adoption of this Basic Profile. However, WS-I offers also other profiles, some of them are already finalized, others are currently still in progress...
[May 28, 2008] "WS-I Presents Specifications at Gartner Summit." Staff, WS-I Announcement May 28, 2008: "WS-I Participating in Gartner Architecture, Development and Integration Summit 2008." — The Web Services Interoperability Organization announced that it is participating in the Standards Corner at Gartners Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2008 in Orlando, FL from June 9-11, 2008 at the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort & Convention Center. WS-I representatives will be on hand to answer questions about the organization. WS-I is pleased to partner with Gartner for the twentieth edition of its Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, said Michael Bechauf, president and chairman of WS-I. Both WS-I and the Summit are focused on Best Practices, so attendees looking to derive maximum value from their services-oriented architecture will benefit from visiting us at the Standards Corner. This is the third ADDI Summit in which WS-I has participated. WS-I has a number of Profiles in progress. (1) Basic Profile: The WS-I Basic Profile 1.2 is a revision of the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and incorporates asynchronous messaging. It is based on the following Web Services specifications: W3C WS-Addressing 1.0 Core W3C WS-Addressing 1.0 SOAP Binding W3C WS-Addressing 1.0 WSDL Binding SOAP 1.1 Binding for MTOM 1.0 The Basic Profile 2.0 builds on the Basic Profile 1.2 and is based on SOAP 1.2 with Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP). (2) Basic Security Profile 1.1: The Basic Security Profile is an interoperability profile that addresses transport security, SOAP messaging security and other security considerations. It references existing specifications and standards, including the OASIS Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security 1.0 specification. The Basic Security Profile 1.1 is an enhancement to the Basic Security Profile 1.0 that provides guidance on the use of Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security 1.1, as well as the REL, Kerberos, SAML, Username and X.509 security token formats. (3) The Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) 1.0 — will deliver interoperability guidance to Web Services architects and developers concerning reliable messaging with security. Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 will be based upon the following Web Services specifications: OASIS WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 OASIS WS-SecureConversation 1.3 WS-ReliableMessaging is a Web Services specification that allows two systems to send messages to each other reliably. The aim of this specification is to ensure that messages are transferred properly from the sender to the receiver. The WS-SecureConversation specification introduces a security context and its usage. The Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 will resolve the interoperability issues that currently exist when these specifications are implemented.
[November 21, 2007] WS-I Releases Updated Basic Profile 1.2 and 2.0 Specifications. Edited by Christopher Ferris, Anish Karmarkar (et al.). Members of the Web Services-Interoperability Organization (WS-I) Basic Profile Working Group are currently working on Basic Profile 1.2 and Basic Profile 2.0. Updated drafts have been published for both specifications. (1) The latest "Basic Profile Version 1.2" Working Group Approval Draft defines a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, along with clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability. This Profile is derived from the Basic Profile 1.1 by incorporating any errata to date and including those requirements related to the serialization of envelopes and their representation in messages from the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. This Profile is NOT intended to be composed with the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. The Attachments Profile 1.0 adds support for SOAP with Attachments, and is intended to be used in combination with this Profile. There are a few requirements in the Basic Profile 1.2 that may present compatibility issues with clients, services and their artifacts that have been engineered for Basic Profile 1.1 conformance. However, in general, the Basic Profile WG members have tried to preserve as much forwards and backwards compatibility with the Basic Profile 1.1 as possible so as not to disenfranchise clients, services and their artifacts that have been deployed in conformance with the Basic Profile 1.1. (2) The "Basic Profile Version 2.0" (Working Group Draft) is the first version of the WS-I Basic Profile that changes the version of SOAP in the profile scope from SOAP 1.1 to the W3C SOAP 1.2 Recommendation. As such, clients, servers and the artifacts that comprise a Basic Profile 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2 conformant application are inherently incompatible with an application that is conformant with the Basic Profile 2.0. However, in general, the Basic Profile WG members have tried to preserve in the Basic Profile 2.0 as much consistency with the guidance and constraints of the Basic Profile 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 as possible. This has been in part facilitated by the fact that the WG tried to remain consistent in the guidance and constraints of the original Basic Profile with the decisions that were being made in the context of the W3C XML Protocols WG as they were concurrently working on the SOAP 1.2 specificatons. For the most part, issues that were resolved in the context of the development of the Basic Profile 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 were not revisited. See also Basic Profile Version 2.0
[April 06, 2007] "WS-I Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 Published as Final Material." The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has announced the release of the Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 as Final Material. The Profile consists of a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, along with clarifications to and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability. Publication of BSP 1.0 has been praised by Web Services security experts as a key enabling technology to enhance interoperability and improve security. The Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 was produced by members of the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group, chaire by Paul Cotton. The Basic Security Profile Working Group was chartered to "develop an interoperability profile dealing with transport security, SOAP messaging security and other Basic-Profile-oriented Web services security considerations. The Working Group is developing and selecting a set of usage scenarios and their component message exchange patterns to guide the profiling work. In addition, the Basic Security Profile Working Group will use the WS-I Security Plan Framework, particularly its collection of usage scenarios and use cases, and the WS-I Work Plan for Web Services Security Interoperability as input to its work." The WS-I Basic Security Profile is an interoperability profile that addresses transport security, SOAP messaging security, and other security considerations. Specifically, the BSP 1.0 document focuses on the interoperability characteristics of two technologies: HTTP over TLS and Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security. HTTP over TLS is a point-to-point technology that protects the confidentiality of all information that flows over an HTTP connection. Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security provides security protection for SOAP messages and applies even when a message passes through several intermediary waypoints, allowing differing levels of protection for selected portions of a message. The BSP 1.0 specification describes a way to apply SOAP Message Security to attachments. The BSP 1.0 also incorporates WSS Token Profiles.
[December 11, 2006] "WS-I Publishes New Profiles and Usage Scenarios for Public Review. Working Group Drafts of Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Security Profile 1.1 and Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 Usage Scenarios Now Available." — The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced the publication of three new Working Group Drafts: the Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Security Profile 1.1 and the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 Usage Scenarios. Advancement of these documents to Working Group Draft status is an invitation to the Web services community to provide technical feedback. The Basic Profile 1.2 is a revision of the Basic Profile 1.1, incorporating errata to date and includes requirements related to the serialization of envelopes and their representation in messages from the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. The WS-I Basic Profile 1.2 is primarily constructed using WS-Addressing which defines a standard mechanism for identifying and exchanging Web services messages between multiple endpoints. The newly chartered Reliable Secure Profile Working Group has released a Working Group Draft of the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 Usage Scenarios for public review. The Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 will deliver interoperability guidance to Web services architects and developers to securely deliver messages reliably between distributed applications in the presence of software component, system, or network failures. The published Usage Scenarios illustrate the use of the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 and how it can be applied or composed with other profiles and specifications across a wide range of Web services applications (e.g., mobile, devices, intermediaries, enterprise applications, etc.). The Usage Scenarios focus on the specific scenarios that exhibit fundamental interoperability issues and that require implementation guidance. In concert with the current work to finalize the Basic Security Profile 1.0, to be released as Final Material in the first quarter, the Basic Security Profile Working Group has released a Working Group Draft of the Basic Security Profile 1.1. The Basic Security Profile 1.1 is a revision of the Basic Security Profile 1.0 and incorporates any errata to date and profiles WS-Security 1.1 and the WS-Security 1.1 token profiles, including Username, X.509, REL, Kerberos, and SAML..."
[July 14, 2006] WS-I Basic Security Profile Enhanced Logging Specification Requirements. Edited by Ram Poornalingam (Microsoft Corporation). Contributors: Craig Chaney (IBM) and Keith Stobie (Microsoft). Produced by members of the Web Services-Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Document Status: Working Group Draft. Version: 1.0. Publication date: May 08, 2006. 8 pages. [This specification defines the enhanced logging facilities used by the WS-I Test Tools to support the Basic Security Profile.] "Verifying Basic Security Profile conformance requires SOAP stack instrumentation. This specification addresses why instrumentation is necessary and how it can be achieved. The document assumes that the reader understands the usage of the Interoperability testing tools version 2.0. [The WS-I Testing Tools are designed to help developers determine whether their Web services are conformant with WS-I profile guidelines.] Complete BSP verification of encrypted SOAP message emitted by the application is not possible. The reason being, Basic Profile verification, a requirement of the BSP, of encrypted messages is not possible. To achieve BP verification, the unencrypted form of the message is necessary. The profile conformance coverage that can be achieved, without adhering to this specification, is only at the surface level..."
[May 02, 2006] "Reliable-messaging 'Profile' Passes." By Martin LaMonica. From CNET News.com (May 02, 2006). "The Web Services-Interoperability organization (WS-I) on Monday said it will create guidelines meant to ensure that standards-based reliable-messaging software from different vendors will work together. The WS-I publishes 'profiles' that include directions on how to write software from published Web services standards, a series of XML-based protocols for sharing data between applications. The organization will establish a working group to write a reliable-messaging profile that will be based on two specifications: OASIS WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 and OASIS WS-Secure Conversations..."
[May 01, 2006] "WS-I Announces New Profile Work for 2006. Web Services Interoperability Organization Initiates Work on Three New Profiles: Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Profile 2.0 and Reliable Secure Profile 1.0." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced that the WS-I Board of Directors has approved two new working group charters, which will result in the development of three new WS-I profiles in 2006: the Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Profile 2.0 and the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0. WS I is a global industry organization that promotes consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. More information about WS-I can be found at www.ws-i.org. The first charter, a revision to the existing WS-I Basic Profile Working Group charter, will result in the development the Basic Profile 1.2 and the Basic Profile 2.0. The Basic Profile 1.2 will incorporate asynchronous messaging and will also consider SOAP 1.1 with Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP). The Basic Profile 2.0 will build on the Basic Profile 1.2 and will be based on SOAP 1.2 with MTOM and XOP. The second charter establishes a new working group, the Reliable Secure Profile Working Group, which will deliver guidance to Web services architects and developers concerning reliable messaging with security... The newly chartered Reliable Secure Profile Working Group will begin developing scenarios, requirements and profile guidance in parallel with the related standardization efforts within the OASIS WS-Reliable Exchange Technical Committee. The working group's primary deliverable is the WS-I Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) 1.0 which will provide guidance to architects and developers concerning reliable messaging with security. RSP 1.0 will be based upon the following specifications: (1) OASIS WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 and (2) OASIS WS-SecureConversation 1.3. The scenarios and requirements work will consider interoperability issues identified across a wide range of Web services applications (e.g., mobile, devices, intermediaries, enterprise applications, etc.). A Chair for the Reliable Secure Profile Working Group will be named shortly. The Basic Profile 1.2 and 2.0, and the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0, when practical, will cleanly compose with other WS-I profiles delivered to date..."
[April 21, 2006] "WS-I Board of Directors Appoints SAP's Michael Bechauf Chairman at Spring Community Meeting Profile Proposals to Tackle Reliable Asynchronous Messaging, Addressing, Secure Conversations and SOAP 1.2 Considered." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced that the WS-I Board of Directors, by unanimous vote, appointed Michael Bechauf Chairman of the Board. Bechauf, Vice President of Industry Standards at SAP, succeeds Tom Glover, Senior Program Manager of Web Services Standards for IBM's Software Group, who has served as WS-I Chairman since the organization's inception in February, 2002. Bechauf was appointed Chairman at the Board of Directors meeting held recently in conjunction with the WS-I Spring Community Meeting... At the recent Board meeting, the WS-I Board of Directors, collaborating with the WS-I Requirements Gathering Working Group, developed two draft working group charters. The first, a revision of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group charter, would result in WS-I's producing the Basic Profile version 1.2, which will incorporate asynchronous messaging, and the Basic Profile version 2.0, which will incorporate SOAP 1.2, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP). The second charter would create the Reliable Secure Profile Working Group, which would deliver guidance to developers concerning reliable messaging with security. The Board will meet on April 18 [2006] to review the final versions of the proposed working group charters. 'Since the inception of WS-I, the organization has been focused on producing profiles that bridge business needs and standards, so that the full value of Web services can be realized,' said Tom Glover. 'The WS-I Basic Profile has become the foundation of Web services-based interoperability, and the entire industry has benefited from the effort WS-I members put into the Profile and supporting deliverables, which help Web services developers and architects in their work. In 2006, WS-I members are working to deliver the Basic Security Profile, which will improve the ability to integrate clients and services where security is required. In addition, our members are taking the first steps towards developing guidance on interoperable asynchronous messaging, and they are looking past that to what comes next. I'm proud to have been a part of this team for the past four years, and I'm looking forward to seeing WS-I, with Michael Bechauf at the helm, continue to help make interoperability a practical reality'..."
[March 24, 2006] "IBM: Proposing An Addition to WS-I Profiles." By Tony Baer. From Computer Business Review Online (March 24, 2006). "After a somewhat stormy birth four years ago, web services interoperability (WS-I) has become one of the success stories in the web services standards world. Its role is devising profiles, or test cases, for determining if web services middleware from different vendors are truly interoperable. IBM is expected to propose the Reliable Asynchronous Messaging Profile, RAMP, at this year's first major WS-I gathering. RAMP will consist of snippets of three recent or pending web services standards: WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-SecureConversation. IBM developed the proposed RAMP profile in conjunction with Ford and Chrysler, and has recently drawn backing from other customers, including Citibank. WS-I profiles are not standards per se, but test cases that vendors accept as their standard for testing the interoperability of their web services middleware products. To keep the tests manageable, they do not necessarily exercise every aspect of the technology stack. Arguably, the strength of WS-I is that it has stuck to its knitting with a couple of very basic interoperability profiles, the Basic Profile and the Basic Security Profile, and has therefore drawn virtually universal industry support. The weakness is that WS-I's lowest common denominator approach has caused the organization to stay behind the times. For instance, the Basic Profile does not even test for the latest version of UDDI, which is supported in most current registry products. And in four years, it only has only finalized one profile, although it is close to finishing the second..."
[March 24, 2006] "Next Steps for WS-I: Interoperable Reliable Asynchronous Messaging." By Tom Glover (Senior Program Manager of Web Services Standards, IBM Software Group). IBM Blog (March 23, 2006). "As we approach the next WS-I Plenary discussion regarding how we come to consensus to get work on Reliable Asynchronous Messaging under way is fast and furious ... which is great news. In my last post I talked about RAMP, or the Reliable Asynchronous Messaging Profile, a draft Profile DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and IBM have produced with contributions from many others, and about the preparation of a draft working group charter intended to move this work into WS-I. The draft charter prepared by Citigroup, IBM, and others went to the WS-I Requirements WG where it was considered and amended by the WS-I membership. It's now before the WS-I board. There's now another proposal being worked. This effort, initiated by Microsoft, differs from the initial proposal in a couple of ways at this point, and I say it that way because it's now before the Requirements WG as well and is being amended. The first difference is that there are charters for two working groups in this proposal rather than one. The second difference is that it proposes that RAMP be sub-divided so that ws-addressing goes into an amended basic profile. The third difference is that it attempts to get WS-I committed via working group charter contents to begin working on SOAP 1.2 now. I'm comfortable adopting some of the changes in this work if it will move us forward. Here's what I hope is in the WG charter approved at next weeks WS-I plenary: (1) Scenarios which articulate what the profiles to be produced will address. (2) A BP 1.2 which extends and evolves BP 1.1 to include WS-Addressing. (3) A Basic Reliable Messaging Profile 1.0 which includes WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-SecureConversation. You'll note that I advocate one working group, not two. This lets small companies send representatives to one WG rather than two, which is a real plus for them. It also cuts down on WS-I overhead, again a big plus..."
[May 17, 2005] Security Challenges, Threats and Countermeasures Version 1.0. Status: Final Material. May 07, 2005. Edited by Jerry Schwarz (Oracle), Bret Hartman (DataPower), Anthony Nadalin (IBM), Chris Kaler (Microsoft), Mark Davis (Sarvega), Frederick Hirsch (Nokia Corporation), and K. Scott Morrison (Layer 7). Copyright (c) 2002-2005 by The Web Services-Interoperability Organization (WS-I) and Certain of its Members. 48 pages. "The Final Material document describes several security challenges, threats and countermeasures in building interoperable Web services, as well as usage scenarios and solutions. It is used to define the requirements for and scope of the Basic Security Profile. Covers: (1) Challenges: describes several security challenges, including ensuring data integrity, data confidentiality and message uniqueness; (2) Threats: outlines 10 threats on these challenges, such as message alteration, falsified messages, message replay, and denial of service attacks; (3) Countermeasures: recommends how technologies like HTTPS and OASIS Web Services Security (WS-Security): SOAP Message Security 1.0 can be used to counter some of these threats; (4) Usage Scenarios and Solutions: describes how these technologies can be used with the Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) that have been used in WS-I deliverables such as the Basic Profile 1.0 Sample Applications..." See the announcement.
[May 17, 2005] "WS-I Promotes Security Document to Final Material Status. 'Security Challenges, Threats and Countermeasures' Approved by Membership." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced the publication of its "Security Challenges, Threats and Countermeasures" document (SCTC) as Final Material. The Final Material designation is applied to those deliverables that have been formally approved by the WS-I member community. Developed by the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group, the SCTC identifies security challenges and threats in building interoperable Web services and countermeasures for these risks. The document is available for download... The WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group has also been at work on the Basic Security Profile (BSP), which is expected to be published as Final Material this Summer. The BSP is an interoperability profile involving transport security, SOAP messaging security and other security considerations implicated by the Basic Profile. The Basic Security Profile is intended to compose with other WS-I profiles and will reference existing specifications used to provide security, including the WS-Security 1.0 OASIS Standard, and provide clarifications and guidance designed to promote interoperability of those specifications..." See preceding bibliographic entry.
[April 24, 2005] "WS-I Submission for the W3C Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 Specification User Experiences." By Erik Johnson (Epicor) for the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Version: 1.0. "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) herein offers a submission to the W3C Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences. The WS-I appreciates this opportunity to contribute to the Workshop and looks forward to working with the W3C in fostering broad adoption of the XML Schema 1.0 Specification. Unlike other specifications relevant to web services, the WS-I had initially felt that there were no clear ambiguities or feature pathways of the W3C XML Schema 1.0 Specification 2nd Edition itself that merited development of a WS-I XML Schema profile. In fact, the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 expressly allows the use of all W3C XML Schema 1.0 Specification constructs and types. In 2003 however, the WS-I commissioned a Working Group to study interoperability issues with XML Schema raised by WS-I Community members, specifically end-user organizations. The XML Schema Work Plan Working Group (WS-I SWPWG) was then chartered to produce a recommendation for possible further action to the WS-I Board. The WS-I SWPWG began work in November of 2004 to study the issue claims and define how the WS-I might in fact take action. This submission summarizes portions of the conversation and consensus from the work of the WS-I XML Schema Work Plan Working Group... It defeats the purpose of XML web services if developers creating or consuming services have to understand the toolkit and platform assumptions of their counterparts. So, toolkit support of XML Schema needs to be measured in the context of suitability to purpose. But there are many permutations of platform stacks, programming languages, and toolkits in use and the idea of suitability is clearly subjective. WS-I members have discussed these issues from two viewpoints: The first is the need for guidance and clarification of the W3C XML Schema 1.0 Specification, especially around best practices for extensibility, versioning, and type composition (modularity). The second is the need for a testing capability that covers XML Schema constructs found in real-world schemas (good, bad, and ugly) rather than academic coverage of XML Schema features..." For details on the workshop, see the news story "W3C Workshop to Address Improved Interoperability of Schema-Aware Software." [cache]
[March 24, 2005] "WS-I Advances BSP Documents, Explores New Items." By Alan J. Weissberger. In Daily News and Information for the Global Grid Community (March 16, 2005). ['Alan Weissberger attended the WS-I Community Meeting, which was held March 8-11 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and offers a report of what was covered. Among the highlights was a representative of the Burton Group who stated that over 70 percent of its Fortune 300 clients recognize the value of WS-I deliverables and are including them in their IT requirements.'] "The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization held its spring 2005 community meeting March 8-11 in Vancouver, British Columbia. WS-I is the lowest common denominator organization for Web services. It attempts to ensure interoperability of Web services standards (developed by W3C and OASIS) by creating profiles based on those standards. Here are a few highlights of this important WS-I meeting: [1] Board of Directors (BoD) is pursuing ISO/IEC JTC1 'Fast Track' submission of WS-I Basic Profile (BP) 1.1 and Basic Security Profile (BSP) documents. This would convey 'de jure' standards status on the WS-I Board approved output documents, which is required in some foreign countries. [2] W3C is considering a new work item to develop an XML schema profile. This is because many industry participants complain that either schema is not specified correctly, or the schema development tools do not work correctly (two sets of tools may not produce interoperable code for the same Web service). WS-I is keenly interest in this activity and a draft charter of a new XML Schema WG has been generated for BoD review. However, that review is on hold for three months, pending W3C decision on pursuing this activity. [3] Basic Security Profile (BSP) WG (see II. below) completed work on Security Challenges, Threats and Countermeasures document which was approved by BoD at this meeting. The WG also progressed the three documents that collectively comprise the BSP. They are waiting for the OASIS WS-Security TC to complete work on Kerberos Token standard before they begin related Kerberos profiling work. [4] Requirements WG finalized a Usage Pattern Template, submitted by Fujitsu Software, for description of WS usage patterns. Previous templates completed: Business Scenarios, Use Cases and Interoperability Field Report. IBM submitted a new use case on message routing and addressing, by illustrating the steps in processing of an invoice using Web services. This application is quite common in enterprise IT that a Usage Pattern will be distilled from this use case..."
[December 15, 2004] "WS-I Launches Advocates Program. WS-I Broadens Community Support with New Recognition Program. More Than 30 Companies Join WS-I as Advocates." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced the introduction of the WS-I Advocates Program, a newly launched recognition opportunity for companies that support the work of WS-I. More than 30 companies have already joined WS-I as Advocates. Although Advocates do not attend WS-I meetings or participate in the organization's technical working groups or committees, they do receive several benefits. Each Advocate's name, logo and testimonial are posted on WS-I's website. In turn, each Advocate may post a special 'WS-I Advocate' logo on its website. Advocates will also receive a subscription to WS-Insider, WS-I's informative newsletter that is published several times each year. The program is free, and any interested company may enroll by completing a registration form... The companies joining WS-I as Advocates, include Acucorp., Approva, AppsSwing Limited, ASD Software, Bestning Technologies, Bluespring Software, Brixlogic, CentrPort, Chip eServices, Dealogic, Docucorp International, EAI User Group, EpiSoftware, Eternet S.A.C., Exocore Consulting, FAMIS Software, Fintricity, FiveSight Technologies, gMorpher, Go Technology, GuruSoft Corporation, HCL Technologies, HTC, Infosys Technologies, Ministry of Finance, Northrop Grumman, Oncorp Direct, Pathlore, QuickTree, ReadiMinds, RezGateway, Softwaremaker.Net, Tata Consulting Services, UBS, vInsurance, WebCab Components, WRQ, XempleX, XWebServices.com and Yellow Pencil. 'The WS-I Advocates Program broadens the community of companies that can support the important work of WS-I and receive some of the many benefits we provide,' said Tom Glover, WS-I Chairman. 'Our organization, which includes Web services vendors, end-user companies, and standards development organizations, is pleased to welcome our new Advocate companies and is grateful for their support.' WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services..."
[August 24, 2004] "WS-I Promotes Profiles to Final Material Status. Basic Profile 1.1, Attachments Profile 1.0 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 Approved by WS-I Membership. WS-I Charters Working Group to Address XML Schema." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) today announced the publication of its Basic Profile 1.1, Attachments Profile 1.0 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 as Final Material. The Final Material designation is applied to those deliverables that have been formally approved by the WS-I member community. 'WS-I understood from its members that existing Web services attachment specifications were increasingly presenting interoperability difficulties,' said Chris Ferris, chair of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group. 'The new profiles provide Web services developers with a flexible mechanism for creating attachment-enabled applications with predictable interoperability'... Basic Profile 1.1 describes how core Web services specifications should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. Specifically, the document consists of a set of nonproprietary Web services specifications and clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of them that promote interoperability. To create version 1.1, the Basic Profile 1.0 was re-architected to relocate all binding-specific envelope serialization requirements to its own profile; the Simple Soap Binding Profile 1.0. This new structure enables the Basic Profile 1.1 to easily compose with any profile that specifies envelope serialization, including the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 and the Attachments Profile 1.0. With the release of the profiles, Web services that use attachments can be tested for WS-I conformance with a composition of Basic Profile 1.1 and Attachments Profile 1.0. Those that do not use attachments can be tested for conformance with a composition of Basic Profile 1.1 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. A claim of conformance to both the Basic Profile 1.1 and the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 will be equivalent to a claim of conformance to the Basic Profile 1.0 plus the published errata... SOAP 1.1 defines an XML structure for transmitting messages, called the envelope. The Simple SOAP Binding Profile mandates the use of that structure and places certain constraints on its use. Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 is derived from the Basic Profile 1.0 requirements related to the serialization of the envelope and its representation in the message... SOAP Messages with Attachments (SwA) defines a MIME multipart/related structure for packaging attachments with SOAP messages. This profile complements the Basic Profile 1.1 to add support for conveying interoperable SwA-based attachments with SOAP messages... WS-I is currently working to develop sample applications and testing tools for use with the newly approved Basic Profile 1.1, Attachments Profile 1.0 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. In addition, at its recent community meeting, WS-I chartered a new working group, called the XML Schema Work Plan Working Group, to focus on collecting and understanding interoperability issues related to the use of XML Schema as the means by which application data is defined with the intent of determining the most suitable course of action for WS-I in addressing those concerns..."
[April 12, 2004] "WS-I Re-Elects webMethods to Board of Directors. Adobe Systems, America Online, Ford and Toshiba Join Web Services Interoperability Effort." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') today announced that Andy Astor, vice president, strategic solutions at webMethods, Inc., has been re-elected to the Board of Directors by the WS-I member community. Astor will serve a two-year term alongside representatives from Accenture, BEA Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., HP, IBM, Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle, SAP AG and Sun Microsystems. WS-I also announced today that Adobe Systems, Inc., America Online, Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Toshiba have joined as contributing members. 'That webMethods has been elected for a second-term to WS-I is a tremendous vote of confidence in our leadership from the Web services community,' said Andy Astor, vice president, strategic solutions at webMethods. 'We are grateful for the opportunity to continue to leverage our integration and interoperability experience to bring a platform-independent, pragmatic perspective to the WS-I Board of Directors. As a leader in Web services-related standards effort for the past seven years, webMethods has demonstrated its commitment to WS-I principles and will continue to promote the adoption of specifications that enable Web services interoperability across all platforms, applications and programming languages.' Interest in WS-I has remained high since its founding in February, 2002, and end-user company involvement continues to grow. Today, WS-I welcomed Adobe Systems, America Online, Ford Motor Co. and Toshiba as contributing members. More than 30 percent of WS-I's membership is now comprised of end-user companies from industries including automotive, financial services, healthcare, insurance, telecommunications, and travel and hospitality..."
[March 10, 2004] "WS-I Issues New Security Guidelines." By John K. Waters. In Application Development Trends (March 10, 2004). "The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization has lent a hand to Web services architects and developers looking for security solutions with the release of a new report that identifies potential threats and outlines countermeasures based on common scenarios. The WS-I's Security Scenarios Working Group Draft is now available for public review... The 48-page draft report describes challenges to ensuring data integrity, data confidentiality and message uniqueness; lists specific threats, such as message alteration, falsified messages, message replay and denial of service attacks; outlines countermeasures that utilize HTTPS and SOAP Message Security 1.0; and includes a number of usage scenarios and solutions that combine these technologies with the Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) that have been used in WS-I deliverables such as the Basic Profile 1.0 Sample Applications... 'We're trying to take basic profiles like SOAP and make sure you can at least protect the messages,' said committee member Eve Maler, standards architect at Sun Microsystems during a press conference at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco... OASIS defines standards for a range of situations, [Hal] Lockhart said. The purpose of the WS-I draft report, he noted, was to narrow the broad set of OASIS recommendations to better fit the needs of WS-I members. 'The WS-I has taken the time to identify the major categories of threats, challenges and mechanisms, he said. 'This activity will form the basis for the problems that the security profile will solve'..." See following bibliographic entry.
[January 27, 2004] "Parasoft Releases SOAPtest 2.5 for Comprehensive Web Services Testing. Web Services Testing Product Now Offers Security Features, MIME Attachment Support and Enhanced Load Testing Features/" - "Parasoft, leading provider of Automated Error Prevention (AEP) software solutions, announced today the release of SOAPtest 2.5, the most comprehensive Web services testing product available today, verifying every aspect of a Web service from WSDL validation, to client/server unit and functional testing, to performance testing. The latest version of SOAPtest offers support for WS-Security, MIME attachments, enhanced load testing features, and other features designed to help development teams prevent errors and accelerate time to market for their Web service initiatives. 'As Web services mature and more companies adopt them, they need comprehensive tools to address key issues such as interoperability, security, change management and scalability,' said Gary Brunell, Parasoft Vice President of Professional Services. 'SOAPtest 2.5 offers the functionality to address all of these issues while improving the software lifecycle by preventing errors early in the development process.' PPQ#What's New in SOAPtest 2.5#PPQ (1) WS-Security support including fully configurable SOAP Headers and support for X509, SAML, username security tokens, XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption. (2) MIME Attachment support including meeting SOAP with Attachments and OASIS ebXML specifications and sending and receiving both text/XML and binary attachments. (3) Enhanced load testing features including SNMP and Windows monitors, customizable HTML reports and detailed report histograms. (4) WS-I Analyzer Tool to verify WSDL and SOAP traffic for conformance, includes WS-I Testing Tool 1.0 and produces WS-I conformance reports. (5) Supports JMS and Asynchronous testing..."
[January 06, 2004] WS-I Basic Profile: Not Just Another Web Service Specification." By Christopher Ferris (IBM). In Web Services Journal Volume 4, Issue 1 (January 2003). "The Final Material version of the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 specification released by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) represents an important milestone for WS-I and the Web services community as a whole. It specifies the standards and technologies required for interoperability between Web services implementations running on different software and operating system platforms... The promise of interoperability is possibly the most important aspect of Web services technologies. That promise stems from the fact that Web services has its foundations in XML, which itself is interoperable across all platforms and programming languages. However, because Web services leverages heavily on the extensible nature of XML, the interoperability aspect of Web services is significantly challenged. While most, if not all, vendors provide support for the established Web services standards, they are still motivated to provide added value to their customers in the form of advanced feature support for things such as security, reliability, transactions, and business process orchestration. Because many of the advanced Web services features are still in the early stages of development and adoption, developers and IT managers need more than just a checklist of (emerging) standards when making project implementation or product purchasing decisions. They need help in being able to determine when they are 'coloring outside the lines' so that they can weigh the merits of incorporating these advanced features against the importance of ensuring broad interoperability of the deployed solution. WS-I was founded with a mission to provide users of Web services technology with the guidance and tools that help them better understand where the boundary lies between the interoperable and not-necessarily-interoperable solution spaces so that they can make well-informed decisions. The WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. WS-I has already begun work on a number of follow-on profiles for Web services, including Attachments and Basic Security. Work will begin on future profiles, tackling some of the more advanced Web services features as the various specifications upon which they are based mature and stabilize and as the interoperability requirements associated with these advanced features are better understood by the community..."
[December 10, 2003] "WS-I Delivers Sample Applications for Basic Profile. Sample Applications Provide Real-World Business Requirements to Web Services." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') today announced the general availability of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0. This important deliverable consists of the WS-I Supply Chain Management Use Cases 1.0, the WS-I Usage Scenarios 1.0, the WS-I Supply Chain Management Technical Architecture 1.0 and Sample Application 1.0 implementations developed by 10 vendor companies. These documents and implementations model a simplified supply chain management scenario and demonstrate the features in the recently released WS-I Basic Profile 1.0. The availability of this material was announced today at the XML Conference & Exposition 2003 taking place this week in Philadelphia. 'The availability of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 deliverables help define best practices for using the Basic Profile 1.0, and provide the real-world implementation guidance and support necessary for customers deploying Web services,' said Sinisa Zimek, chairman of the Sample Applications Working Group. 'We believe that the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 is an important catalyst in the WS-I effort to create industry-level Web services profiles and tools.' The WS-I Sample Application 1.0 provides a configurable collection of Web services, which exercise the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 using a supply chain scenario that models the interactions between multiple retail storefronts, warehouses and manufacturers. Implementations of the Sample Application have been delivered by BEA Systems, Bowstreet, Corillian, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Quovadx, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. WS-I will be demonstrating these implementations at an interoperability showcase this week at the XML Conference & Exposition 2003. The Sample Application Technical Architecture 1.0 details a common design and implementation of the supply chain management application. One of the goals of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 is to exploit as many of the aspects of the Basic Profile 1.0 as possible. To this end, the Sample Application Technical Architecture implements several schema-naming conventions, SOAP message formats, SOAP message styles, and WSDL design practices that all conform to the Basic Profile..."
[November 18, 2003] "OMG, OAGI, and POSC Join WS-I. New Associate Membership Category Extends Communication and Cooperation Among Key Web Services Organizations." - "Today, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced that the Object Management Group (OMG), the Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI), and the Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC) have become associate members of WS-I. This new membership category was created to improve communication and cooperation between WS-I and standards development organizations to best meet the needs of customers and the Web services industry. The announcement was made at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit being held this week in Baltimore. 'While WS-I and standards organizations like the ones announced today have different purposes, we share a common vision for the future of Web services,' said Ed Cobb, board director and chair of the WS-I Liaison Committee. 'WS-I is committed to building and maintaining strong relationships with these organizations, and the associate membership category enables these organizations to participate more directly in the work of WS-I. In addition, WS-I continues to work with other standards organizations through informal liaison channels.' [...] Associate member benefits to qualified organizations include access to the WS-I member website and its documents, access to technical working group materials, participation in technical working groups and community meetings, and the use of the WS-I logo... WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices, and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services. Since its formation in February 2002, more than 170 companies have joined WS-I..."
[September 18, 2003] "A Preview of WS-I Basic Profile 1.1." By Anish Karmarkar. From O'Reilly WebServices.xml.com (September 16, 2003). "On 12th August 2003 WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) announced the release of the final specification of Basic Profile 1.0 a set of recommendations on how to use web services specifications to maximize interoperability. For developers, users, and vendors of web services and web services tools this is a big leap forward to achieving interoperability in the emerging and fast changing world of web services. But what else has WS-I been working on? WS-I recognizes the fact that Basic Profile 1.0 is just a beginning and that it's a long road toward web services maturity and interoperability. In its mission toward accelerating the adoption of web services and promoting interoperability, the Basic Profile Working Group, which developed Basic Profile 1.0, is tasked with generating Basic Profile 1.1 to incorporate attachments... Basic Profile 1.1, as the name indicates, is the next version of Basic Profile. It builds on 1.0, adding support for SOAP Messages with Attachments (SwA) and WSDL 1.1's Section 5 MIME bindings. As part of the process of releasing a Profile, other Working Groups within WS-I develop sample applications and test tools for the Profile. This ensures that the Profile is implementable and 'debugged' before its final release. Like Basic Profile 1.0, Basic Profile 1.1 will be released with sample applications and test tools. This article provides a preview of Basic Profile 1.1 based on the latest Working Group Draft. The Basic Profile Working Group has been working on Basic Profile 1.1 since January 2003. In the course of its development the WG identified more than 70 technical issues that needed to be resolved. Only a very few minor ones remain. Please remember that this preview is based upon a Working Group Draft; as a work in progress can (and almost certainly will) be modified as the draft Profile is reviewed and refined... The most widely implemented and accepted attachment technology is MIME. SwA combines MHTML and content-id URIs (CID) for referencing MIME parts in SOAP. Basic Profile 1.1 has selected SwA as the attachment technology and WSDL 1.1 Section 5 MIME bindings for describing SwA. Basic Profile 1.1, as with Basic Profile 1.0, clarifies, fixes, and subsets the relevant specs to make it more interoperable and removes ambiguities. This addresses a real need that developers and users of web services have when dealing with large binary data and transporting it within a SOAP 1.1 Envelope. The direction that Basic Profile 1.1 has taken fits very nicely with the direction that XMLP WG has taken with respect to attachments for SOAP 1.2, as documented in SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM). Both use MIME and are based on SwA... Interoperable attachments is one of the features that is frequently demanded by developers and users of web services. The Basic Profile Working Group addresses this need by including SwA in Basic Profile 1.1, resolving ambiguities, and by filling in the gaps of existing specifications. Furthermore, Basic Profile 1.1 also enables language binding tools to generate appropriate APIs to take full advantage of attachments..."
[September 11, 2003] "Sun is First to Market With Platform for WS-I Compliant Web Services Applications. Recent Beta Release of the J2EE 1.4 Software Developer Kit and Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.2 Demonstrate Sun's Java Web Services Leadership." - "Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the availability of a qualification release of the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) version 1.4 source code for licensees of the J2EE platform. Available less than one month after the WS-I Basic Profile was finalized, the source code delivers support for the final WS-I Basic Profile and includes the J2EE programming model for portable Web services applications. The source-code release includes compatibility tests, allowing J2EE licensees to make progress on implementing J2EE 1.4. 'With our partners and as a WS-I board member, Sun is leading the charge in supporting standards-compliant, Java Web Services platforms,' said Jeff Jackson, vice president of Sun J2EE platform and application server engineering, Sun Microsystems, Inc. 'Java and Web Services merge in J2EE 1.4 as the preferred platform for building enterprise-grade applications and the only available software environment that is platform independent and interoperable by design. The introduction of J2EE 1.4, with its support for more Web services standards and protocols than any other platform, is a prime example of Sun's leadership position in this space.' WS-I specifications are designed to ensure interoperability between different vendors' Web services products. Through the Java Community Process (JCP), Java provides open application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide enterprises with a choice and to keep developers from becoming dependent upon a single vendor's technology. Java developers can save time and money by working with standard APIs for XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Web Services, such as JAXP, JAXB, JAX-RPC and JAX-R, instead of proprietary APIs that may change from vendor to vendor. Java and XML technologies allow users to easily develop applications that can be seamlessly deployed across all major operating platforms, including Solaris, Linux and Windows. In addition, Java developers won't be tasked with learning specific Web services specifications or acquiring WS-I interoperability expertise, because profile guidelines are included in Java platforms and development toolkits such as the Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP). The Java platform also enables IT organizations to leverage their current technology investments by providing simplified integration with applications and legacy systems, reducing cost and complexity within the organization. As a board member of the WS-I organization, Sun is continuing to make key technological contributions to enhance the interoperability of Web services. To date, Sun has released several versions of its J2EE platform based on early WS-I specifications, such as Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.2 and J2EE 1.4 SDK Beta 2. Once J2EE 1.4 is finalized, Sun will release compatibility tests, source code and a software development toolkit (SDK). Java has long been the developer's choice for Web services, and J2EE 1.4 represents a culmination of work by the JCP and the technology industry to deliver the first platform to support the WS-I Basic Profile..." See also: Java Web Services Developer Pack V1.2 Supports WS-I, WS-Security, and UBL Applications."
[August 31, 2003] "WS-I Plans Security, Messaging, Other Profiles." By Paula Rooney. In (August 13, 2003). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization is now turning its attention to security, messaging and other profiles. The forthcoming WS-I guideline for implementing security in Web services will be based on the WS-Security specification currently before the OASIS standards body and will be finished in roughly one year, said Chris Ferris, chairman of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group and architect in the emerging e-business industry architecture at IBM. Ferris spoke at the XML Web Services One Conference in Boston on Tuesday. Ferris said the development of additional 'features' such as security and messaging on top of the Basic Profile 1.0 will enable more complex Web services transactions. The WS-I will likely provide profiles for reliable messaging, policy, service-level agreements as well as transaction coordination, Ferris said. The first WS-I security profile will guide developers in how to implement a variety of security standards and specifications including SSL, IPSec and HTTP authentication, Ferris said. 'You can take WS-Security and make it a service,' said Ferris. 'It'll take nine months of technical work, and we'll have a basic security profile in about one year.' Security will become more important as SOAP messages and Web services begin to cross corporate boundaries, said Harris Reynolds, engineer and technical evangelist at The Mind Electric. Reynolds said the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that has been submited as a potential specification to OASIS will enable cross-enterprise Web services business process integration..."
[August 15, 2003] "Oracle Helps Developers Build Interoperable Web Services." - "Oracle Corp., the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced the availability of a new sample application to help developers test the interoperability of software and Web services, based on the latest recommendations from the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization. The sample application -- an early release of WS-I supply chain application for Oracle9i Application Server --implements a real world supply chain scenario by modeling the interactions between multiple Web storefronts, retail warehouses and manufacturers. The sample is based on WS-I Basic Profile 1.0, and demonstrates how Web services can connect heterogeneous systems and autonomous organizations. As a result, developers will be able to test the interoperability of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based Web services deployed on Oracle9i Application Server with Web services deployed on other platforms such as .NET and J2EE application servers from other vendors. The sample application can be downloaded free-of-charge from Oracle Technology Network (OTN)... The sample application utilizes many of the features of the WS-I Basic Profile, including a variety of XML schema naming conventions, SOAP message formats, SOAP message styles, and WSDL design practices. The upcoming release of Oracle JDeveloper, recently announced at JavaOne 2003, is scheduled to feature integrated support for WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 Conformance Testing, enhancing the existing Web services capabilities of the tool, which include instant deployment and testing with the embedded Oracle9i Application Server, local and remote debugging, profiling and integrated SOAP message monitoring. The new feature will enable developers to deliver WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 compatible applications and services more quickly and easily... The WS-I sample supply chain application for Oracle9i Application Server is immediately available for free download from Oracle's online developer community Web site, OTN, which also offers many additional resources for Web services developers and architects. A developer's preview of the new Oracle JDeveloper is scheduled to be available for free download and evaluation from OTN by the end of the year..."
[August 12, 2003] "WS-I Announces General Availability of the Basic Profile 1.0. WS-I Member Community Delivers Guidelines to Ensure Interoperability, Reduce Cost and Lower Complexity of Implementing Web Services Solutions." - "At XML Web Services One the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the general availability of the Basic Profile 1.0. The Basic Profile 1.0, which has been formally approved by the WS-I member community, consists of implementation guidelines on how core Web services specifications should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. The specifications covered by the Basic Profile include SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0 and XML Schema. 'Starting today, every Web service developer and provider will have a common framework for implementing interoperable solutions, and buyers will have a common reference point for purchasing decisions,' said Tom Glover, chairman of WS-I. 'WS-I has resolved more than 200 interoperability issues associated with using the core Web services specifications together. The Basic Profile 1.0 will significantly simplify the task of implementing interoperable Web services solutions within and across enterprise boundaries.' 'Support for the Basic Profile is the baseline for interoperable Web services,' said Dan Sholler, vice president of Technology Research Services at the META Group. 'Customers should demand that all of their Web services-enabled technology be compliant with the Basic Profile, and that in turn will lay the foundation for Web services to fulfill their promise and provide technology independent interoperability.' Later this Fall, WS-I will release Test Tools and Sample Applications supporting the Basic Profile 1.0. The Test Tools, available in both C# and Java(TM) implementations, are designed to inspect and validate that a Web service meets the interoperability requirements of the Basic Profile. The Sample Applications demonstrate the Basic Profile at work, including the design, implementation, test and deployment of Web services, based upon selected business scenarios and implemented on 10 different platforms. In parallel with the release of the Test Tools, WS-I will announce how Web services software vendors, hardware vendors, and services providers will be able to claim conformance of their products to the Basic Profile 1.0..."
[July 29, 2003] "Double Standards." By Sean Rhody (WSJ Editor-in-Chief). In Web Services Journal Volume 3, Issue 8 (August 2003), page 3. "In June I attended the JavaOne conference... and was reminded, once again, that the lack of a single standards body is a serious roadblock to implementation of Web services... I was further reminded of the mess we're in by some of the Web services presentations. While obviously biased toward Java (it was JavaOne, after all), what really got me was the way everyone needed to explain how this specification came from HP, that standard was developed by W3C, and OASIS has a competing specification to some other specification. It's clear that there are too many bodies producing standards, not to mention too many standards themselves. The Java model works somewhat better, with a single standards organization and the JSR process. Rather than develop competing specifications (SAML or WS-Security, for example), the JCP provides guidance from multiple companies toward the creation of a single standard that all Java vendors will comply with. No one has to decide whether to use BPML or BPEL, or the Java equivalent... I would propose that WS-I become the central Web services body, and that the members of the other bodies treat them as the Supreme Court of Web services. Once they rule on a specification, let there be no further disputes. Let's limit the number of specifications so the innovations can go toward making a smaller set of standards better. Of course the WS-I may not want to act as the final arbiter of Web services fate, and for various reasons, many vendors may not want the WS-I as currently constituted to be the sole determining body for Web services..." [alt URL]
[July 14, 2003] "WS-I Discusses Interoperable Web Services." By Allison Taylor. In ComputerWorld Australia (July 14, 2003). "The speed and extent of Web services adoption depends on the success of making them interoperable, the president and chairman of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) said at a roundtable discussion on Web services in Toronto last Thursday. Tom Glover and a slew of WS-I member companies including Microsoft Canada Corp., IBM Canada Ltd., Nortel Networks, NetManage Canada Inc., Hummingbird Ltd. and Cognos Inc., participated in the discussion which focused on the importance of interoperable Web services for the entire IT industry and how those standards should be made. The WS-I is a group of about 160 software companies working to identify Web services interoperability requirements and developing materials to address those needs. The groups that comprise the WS-I try to understand how Web services are used throughout the industry, try to understand the requirements and then, as a community, the groups attempt to resolve challenges, define services and define how those services behave at an infrastructure level, Glover said. By taking the resources within IT and working together, the WS-I hopes to create a set of standards to help everyone understand what Web services look like, he added. As an example of the importance of developing standards, Glover highlighted the battle between the BETA video tape versus VHS, which resulted in the market and public determining VHS as the winner. 'This battle is not the model we want for Web services. It's not efficient and it costs too much. We don't want the market penalized but we want Web services to be understood,' he said, adding that standards would ensure the market completely understands Web services. Phil Edholm, chief technology officer and vice-president of network architecture for Nortel Networks, said there is a great economic and productivity value in having interoperable Web services and as such, it's critical to Web Services to have the WS-I succeed'..."
[June 03, 2003] "WS-I Basic Profile: Why Wait?" By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (June 03, 2003). "While the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is working toward a basic profile for interoperability of Web services, customers should not wait but should use tools that are available today. During a session at the Microsoft TechEd 2003 conference here, Yasser Shohoud, a program manager on the Microsoft XML Messaging team, said he does not know when the industry will see a basic profile from WS-I, but it should not matter. I don't know when the WS-I Basic Profile will be ready, but does it matter?' Shohoud said. 'I think the world should not wait for that.' Shohoud said, 'The bottom line is when you're trying to interoperate you have tools that need to work together,' but there are few tools that support the broad spectrum of interoperability issues. In the interim, while a WS-I Basic Profile is being hashed out, 'people should avoid things in the basic profile that are not widely used,' Shohoud said. 'If you are ready to build Web services today, you should not be waiting for any profile.' The WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 was approved as a draft specification in April, but has not been approved as a final document yet..."
[April 23, 2003] "WS-I Announces Availability of Testing Tools. Pre-Release Now Available for Public Comment." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') today announced the availability of two testing tools for interoperability assessment with the WS-I Basic Profile. Pre-release versions of the Web Service Communication Monitor and the Web Service Profile Analyzer are now available. The tools, with implementations in both C# and Java, can be used on any Web services platform. The testing tools and their supporting documentation and processes were developed by the WS-I Test Tools Working Group. 'The tools have been designed in such a way to allow for expansion and extension, so they can accommodate the Basic Profile as well as future profiles,' said Jacques Durand, chair of the Test Tools Working Group, and director, Industry Relations at Fujitsu Software Corporation. 'They can be configured to specifically address whichever profile definition they need to verify. Testing results will help developers ensure that their Web services meet the WS-I interoperability guidelines.' The Web Service Communication Monitor ('Monitor') captures messages exchanged between Web services and the software that invokes them and stores the messages for later analysis. Today's pre-release version captures HTTP-based SOAP messages. The Web Service Profile Analyzer ('Analyzer') evaluates messages captured by Monitor, and also validates the description and registration artifacts of the Web service. This includes the WSDL document(s) that describes the Web service, and the XML schema files that describe the data types used in the WSDL service definition and the UDDI registration entries. The output from Analyzer is a report that indicates whether or not a Web service meets the interoperability guidelines of the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0. The report provides details on the specific deviations and failures, so that users know which requirements of the WS-I Basic Profile were not met..." Note: Versions of the tool were available for C# and Java.
[April 08, 2003] "Sun Wastes Little Time Preparing WS-I 'Wish List'." By Vance McCarthy. In Integration Developer News (April 07, 2003). "Sun Microsystems is wasting little time mapping out their agenda for contributing to the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization), a multi-vendor web services group of more than 160+ vendors co-founded by Microsoft and IBM. Sun's long campaign for a seat on WS-I's board came to a successful close last week, as Mark Hapner, a Sun distinguished engineer and chief web services strategist for the company, was voted to a two-year term. Following the vote, Hapner [said] that he felt 'WS-I had made a very good start,' but added that Sun intended to use its new influence as a board member to push for a few issues. 'Our job is to represent the Java and J2EE developer community, and that is what will do,' Hapner said. Java vendors IBM, BEA, Borland and Rational are all members of WS-I. While WS-I execs and publicly hoping that Sun's membership in the group's board will speed development of web services standards, it's equally possible that Sun could actually slow things down, depending how you look at it... Hapner wants WS-I to improve the way the group interacts with formal standards bodies, notably the W3C and OASIS. He noted that only two pending web services standards (WS-Security and DIME) had been presented to a formal standards body, and claimed that proposals advocated by WS-I members (including the WS family of standards being proposed by IBM and Microsoft) should also be submitted to standards group... [Hapner also wants ] stricter guides for cross-platform interoperability: 'WS-I's approach to interoperability between platforms may need some extra work,' and, as a result, he said he intends to push WS-I to make its conformance procedures more strict, and overall 'improve the quality of platform conformance.' Under the current WS-I approach, Hapner claimed, there are some 'very simple ways' for developers to get caught in building non-conformant specs..."
[March 31, 2003] "WS-I: Guiding Interoperability." By Jeff Reser (IBM Strategic Software Solutions). In .NET Magazine (March 2003). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) was formed in February 2002 to address the issues surrounding the interoperable nature of a Web services-oriented architecture. WS-I isn't a standards development organization, but it works closely with a number of standards bodies, such as the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to promote and utilize the right set of technologies in compatible business scenarios. The WS-I community grows as companies realize their contributions to WS-I active working groups benefit a common set of goals: to enable and promote the practical adoption of Web services technologies and open standards. WS-I concerns itself with the underlying themes of the aches and pains in implementing Web services across disciplines. Recently, WS-I published a working draft set of architectural guidelines as part of its first major deliverable: the WS-I Basic Profile. The Basic Profile consists of implementation guidelines recommending how a set of core Web services specifications (SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0, and XML Schema) should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. It helps to ensure standards developed by different organizations and vendors interoperate with each other, especially in the increasingly significant Web services areas. The WS-I scenarios included in the profile describe how you can apply Web services to meet real-world business needs. These scenarios provide real-world examples of how you can utilize Web services, while also demonstrating how you can use the specifications individually and/or with others. The WS-I deliverables also include sample applications that support the profiles and scenarios, and testing tools and materials. These sample applications of basic Web services illustrate best practices for implementation and are developed in multiple programming languages using multiple development tools. Sample applications serve as working examples for companies planning to implement Web services. The test materials and tools can be used to verify that the interactions observed with the monitored Web services conform to the set of guidelines and test assertions that define the profiles..."
[March 27, 2003] "Sun Wins WS-I Seat." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (March 27, 2003). "Sun Microsystems Inc. has won a two-year position on the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) board of directors, sources said. In winning this slot, Sun joins the leaders in Web services on the board of an organization initially formed with the apparent intent of keeping the Unix systems vendor out of its ranks. Now Sun is a member of that board, with the same rights and responsibilities as the rest of the 11 members... The other open board seat went to webMethods Inc. The company will serve a one-year term. Mark Hapner, Sun's lead architect for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and chief Web services strategist for Java Web services, will represent Sun on the WS-I board. Hapner told eWEEK in a prior interview that he was pleased to have the opportunity to run for the WS-I board slot and said that Sun has participated 'strongly' in the organization since it joined last October. Sun has participated in WS-I efforts involving business process integration, developing sample applications for testing interoperability, and chairing a security working group. The Santa Clara, Calif., company also has been instrumental in developing and promoting Web services standards like WS-Reliability, he said. And Sun has made conformance to the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 a requirement of J2EE 1.4 compliance, he added... Sun's work with the Java Community Process, which is the multi-vendor coalition that votes on Java platform specifications, gave the company an advantage over competitors for the slot as well, Hapner said. 'We found in our work in the Java compatibility arena that it takes significant investment and dogged persistence to achieve interoperability,' he said. 'The payback is customers feel secure in broadly pursuing interoperability.' Indeed, Sun's Java expertise itself was a distinguishing factor that set Sun apart from others in the running, the company said. 'We are the representative for Java and J2EE, which will be one of the two primary platforms on which people will develop Web services,' Hapner said. Hapner said Sun's history is that of a leader in the Web services space. The company has had strong participation in the evolution of Simple Object Access Protocol 1.2 and Web Services Description Language 1.2, as well as other specifications and foundational Web technologies, he said."
[March 19, 2003] "Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I.org): What's it All About?" By [Staff]. From WebServices.org (March 19, 2003). ['WebServices.org interviews Chris Ferris, on his views of WS-I as IBM's representative to the Basic Profile WG. Chris is an Architect with IBM's Emerging e-business Industry Architecture group and is actively engaged in the development of Web Services and e-business standards. He currently represents IBM on the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group (WG) as editor of the Basic Profile 1.1 specification. He also represents IBM on the W3C Web Services Architecture WG.'] Excerpts: "The main objective of WS-I is to promote and enable the interoperability of Web services, which I believe is the most fundamental aspect of Web services. People are using Web services to integrate their heterogenous computing environments, both within and external to their organizational boundaries. Without interoperability, this becomes an impossible task... First, there is no single standards organization that 'owns' Web services. The W3C is working on some of the foundational technologies such as XML, XML Schema, XML Signatures and Encryption, SOAP and WSDL. OASIS is working on some of the higher-level technologies such as WS-Security, UDDI, Remote Portals, etc. The IETF is responsible for some of the lower-level protocol technologies such as HTTP, TLS, etc. WS-I fulfills a needed function in providing a single venue for integrating the efforts of these various organizations. Secondly, with regards to SOAP1.1 and WSDL1.1, there is no standards organization that 'owns' those specifications; WS-I fulfills a need by providing clarifications and constraints on those de facto standards that will enable vendors and developers to implement and use these technologies in an interoperable manner... WS-I has no plans of defining new specifications for Web services technologies. That is not its role... WS-I recently agreed to address the issue of attachments for SOAP. The Basic Profile v1.1 will incorporate the SOAP Messages with Attachments (MIME) specification and provide a means for describing the use of attachments in WSDL. We expect that this work will be completed in a relatively short period of time, hopefully the technical work will be completed by April of this year and the Basic Profile 1.1 can begin its own review and approval cycle, culminating in the early summer of 2003. Additionally, we are in the process of planning for a Security Profile and will be likely taking on the question of how one can claim conformance of platform and/or tools (e.g., .NET, WebLogic or Websphere) with a profile(s). It should be an interesting and challenging year..."
[March 19, 2003] "Sun Expects Bumpy Ride Ahead With WS-I. [Performance, Measurement & Standards.]" By Paula Rooney. In CMPNetAsia (March 19, 2003). "As it tries to get one of its own on the executive board of the WS-I, Sun Microsystems expects a controversial and politically bumpy road ahead for the interoperability organisation. Ed Julson, Sun's group marketing manager for Java and Web Services, said only two out of 14 proposed WS-I standards being tossed around by founders Microsoft and IBM have been submitted as standards -- WS-I security and Direct Internet Messaging Encapsulation (DIME) -- and that spells possible trouble. 'Take a look at the 14 standards defined by the GXA [Global XML Web Services Architecture], largely by Microsoft and Sun. What about the 12 other specs?' Julson said at the Web Services Edge 2003 East conference, Boston. 'A spec isn't a standard. There will be debate within the WS-I on what is a standard and what is not. WS-I hasn't gotten to the hard part yet'... While the creation of the WS-I organization was praised by a pleased but jaded IT industry, Sun fumed over being left out. However, Sun officially jumped on the WS-I bandwagon late last year and is now lobbying to get one of its executives on the executive board with Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. At the conference, the Sun official hinted that the WS-I could become yet another API battleground that characterized the 1990s. 'We don't want to have to pay a tax,' he said..."
[February 28, 2003] "WS-I Announces Board Nominations." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (February 26, 2003). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) Wednesday announced the nominations for two openings on the organization's board of directors. WS-I officials said representatives from Cape Clear Software Inc., Nokia Corp., SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., VeriSign Inc. and webMethods Inc. have been nominated for election to the organization's board of directors. The limited number of nominees means a better possibility for Sun to join the board, where many -- including company insiders -- have, since the inception of WS-I a year ago, said Sun rightfully belongs. Sun cleared the way for joining WS-I in October after much wrangling, finger pointing and murmuring regarding Sun's role as an innovator in the world of Web services. WS-I officials said elections will be held in mid-March, with the results being announced March 28 and the new directors beginning their one- to two-year terms on April 1, 2003. A WS-I spokeswoman explained that the newly elected board members would have tenure of one or two years. The usual term for an elected board member is two years, and founding members such as IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are permanently in position. 'The basic story is that there will be two directors elected,' a WS-I spokeswoman said. 'The one with the fewer votes during the March election receives a 12-month term. The one with the most votes receives the standard 24-month term. The usual term for an elected director is 24 months. This start up aberration is in place so that we can establish a staggered election schedule were one director position is filled each year.' The nominated companies and individuals are: Jorgen Thelin, chief scientist at Cape Clear; Juhani Murto, senior manager of Web services architecture at Nokia; Ugo Corda, principal standards analyst at SeeBeyond; Mark Hapner, distinguished engineer and chief Web services strategist at Sun; Sundar Krishnamurthy, a product manager at VeriSign; and Andy Astor, vice president of Enterprise Web Services at webMethods..."
[February 21, 2003] "Sun Trumpets Royalty-Free Web Services Specs. Company Challenges Microsoft, IBM." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (February 20, 2003). "Royalty-free industry specifications are needed to enable Web services to fulfill its potential as a mechanism for business process integration on a massive scale, Sun officials stressed during a Sun 'Chalk Talk' session in San Francisco on Thursday. Any requirement that specific vendors be paid royalties for use of their technologies in standardized Web services specifications could stifle the growth of Web services, said Mark Bauhaus, Sun vice president of Java Web services. Sun wants its royalty-free position to be accepted by other members of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) and is running for election to a seat on the WS-I governing board in March. Specifically, Microsoft and IBM need to embrace royalty-free Web services, specifications, according to Bauhaus. With the vast increase in devices accessing the Internet, which could eventually number into the billions, and the low cost of Internet access, Web services are poised for dramatic growth as a business process integration mechanism for a variety of applications, Bauhaus said, but Web services must be royalty-free and based on open standards, and specifications must be converged. 'The headlines that we're writing now are about Web services. Is it going to be royalty-free or is someone going to hijack it?' Bauhaus said. He noted that IBM and Microsoft have produced a proposed specification for automating interaction between Web services, called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). This proposal has not yet been submitted to a standards organization. Sun has a competing proposal, Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), being examined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)..."
[February 12, 2003] "WS-I Sets Basic Profile for Interoperable Web Services." By Vance McCarthy and Rob Cheng. In Integration Developer News (February 10, 2003). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization's 48-page Basic Profile draft document, edited by WS-I members from Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems, and webMethods, is designed to present an exhaustive list of implementation areas In specific, the WS-I Basic Profile aims to spell out a set of open (non-proprietary) web services specifications for how developers and vendors should implement SOAP, WSDL and other key first-generation web services technologies to insure interoperability between different technologies (such as Java and .Net, Java and Windows). The Basic Profile's implementation guidelines recommend how SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0 and XML Schema should be used together to develop interoperable Web services, drilling down into the following implementation areas: (1) Messaging -- The exchange of key SOAP elements, including the SOAP processing model and XML representations of SOAP messages; (2) Service Description -- How web services and/or objects are prepared and transmitted (Document Structure, Types, Messages, Port Types, Bindings, etc.) (3) Discovery: metadata that enables the advertisement of a Web service's capabilities; (4) Security -- The provision of integrity, privacy, authentication and authorization (HTTPS, Certificate Authorities, Encryption Algorithms)... 'WS-I is looking to provide a single point of aggregation or contact for all interoperability activity,' said Rob Cheng, chairman of WS-I's marketing communications committee. 'Without this organization, you would actually have to have a large amount of your staff and resources focused on all the different [standards] activities, and then try to figure out how they all work together. To get more insight on the role WS-I hopes to play for developers and implementers of web services, Integration Developer News spoke in-depth with Cheng..." [Q: 'What's next up for WS-I? Any further add-ons to the current Basic Profile in the works?'] A: (Cheng) "We will have a relatively short term around step that will handle SOAP with attachments. This is something that has been driven by the membership, and something that has been discussed by the end user companies and the smaller vendors to have attachment support. The SOAP with attachments be handled in an updated Basic Profile (v1.1), and implementation issues for SOAP 1.2 will come later this year..."
[February 04, 2003] "Sun to Standardize Web Services in J2EE 1.4. Next Version Supports WS-I's Basic Profile Specification." By James Niccolai. In InfoWorld (February 04, 2003). "Sun Microsystems will incorporate an important specification with the next version of its enterprise Java platform that is designed to ensure interoperability among Web services applications. Version 1.4 of Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which is due for release mid-year, will incorporate the Basic Profile specification developed by the Web Services Interoperability Organization. The WS-I is a multi-vendor group founded by IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft and others to help define standards for the emerging Web services model. The Basic Profile defines a standard method for employing a handful of technologies that have become central to Web services. They include XML (Extensible Markup Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for messaging, WSDL (Web Services Description Language) for describing services, and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) for looking them up on a network. Some developers have used those technologies already, but without the programming and data models laid out in the Basic Profile they have had no assurance that their applications will interoperate with those of other developers. Adding the Basic Profile to the next version of J2EE is intended to provide that assurance, said Ralph Galantine, a group marketing manager at Sun. Java licensees including Sun, Oracle, IBM and BEA are expected to release certified J2EE 1.4 products soon after the standard is finalized. As a member of the WS-I, Microsoft is also expected to back the Basic Profile, in a rare example of cooperation between Microsoft and its rivals in the Java camp. A Microsoft spokeswoman noted that the specification has yet to be finalized, but said Microsoft will support it in software products when it's completed. A draft of the WS-I Basic Profile was released in October, and at that time the group was shooting for completion early this year. .. The Web services model provides a way for linking different types of business applications together, either within an organization or, it's hoped, among partners, suppliers and customers for streamlining commerce. More ambitiously, proponents say, Web services can be used to "expose" business programs, such as a retirement plan application, as services that can be used by other companies. After a year of steady hype, however, the model has taken off only gradually and in a limited way, analysts have said. Concerns have been raised about security, a lack of clearly defined standards and the sheer complexity of the development work involved. Adding the WS-I Basic Profile is intended to go some way towards meeting some of those concerns..."
Announcement 2003-01-30: "WS-I Publishes Sample Applications, Use Cases, and Scenarios for Public Review and Comment. Candidate Review Drafts for Supply Chain Management. Sample Application Illustrates Usage of WS-I Basic Profile 1.0."
[January 29, 2003] "WS-I Members Take Stand Against 'Big-Name Bias'." By Gavin Clarke [ComputerWire]. In The Register (January 29, 2003). "Small and medium sized ISVs are vying to lead an IBM and Microsoft Corp-backed web services organization, amid sentiment the group's direction is being misdirected by big-name vendors, Gavin Clarke writes... webMethods Inc and Cape Clear Software Inc told ComputerWire yesterday they will stand for election to the board of the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization, in the hope of making the board more representative of common members' interests. The vendors are the first companies to be named as candidates as the WS-I has refused to release details, saying its constitution does not require disclosure. To date only Sun Microsystems Inc has been named as a potential candidate for elections, due in March. webMethods Inc and Cape Clear spoke as it emerged yesterday that WS-I has agreed to add support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) attachments to its first major piece of published work, the Basic Profile 1.0 currently in public draft. Support for SOAP attachments would ensure a standards-based approach is taken in the Basic Profile for adding binary attachments, such as JPEG files, to SOAP messages. Failure to include SOAP attachments means files must, instead, be encoded in the main SOAP message by a sender and then de-coded by the recipient in a process that reduces the potential efficiency of web service-based communications... Prasad Yendluri, co-editor of WS-I's Basic Profile and webMethods' principle architect, said, though, the WS-I yesterday approved inclusion of SOAP attachments in an incremental release of Basic Profile, version 1.1, to avoid impacting delivery of 1.0. Yendluri said version 1.1 would be published 'soon after' version 1.0. He added SOAP attachments were the subject of early debate but confirmed these were initially discarded from version 1.0. 'There has been a recent re-consideration,' he said citing member feedback and evolution of version 1.2 of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) underlying SOAP specification. The issue, though, is far-from resolved for small- and medium-size companies who constitute the bulk of WS-I's membership and clearly feel that their interests are not being properly represented by the board. The WS-I's nine-member board comprises Accenture, BEA Systems Inc, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel Corp, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp and SAP AG..."
[January 23, 2003] "WS-I Second Round Spec Homes In On Security." By Gavin Clarke [ComputerWire]. In The Register (January 21, 2003). "A Microsoft Corp-backed industry group is preparing its second set of web services specifications to ensure interoperability of emerging XML security standards, writes Gavin Clarke. The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization has created a working group whose task is to map out potential deliverables for a proposed security specification, called a profile, that will be based on security standards from other organizations... This will be the WS-I's second proposed profile, following the Basic Profile Working Draft that is currently in draft and is scheduled for completion in the second quarter of this year. The first profile consists of guidelines for how implementations of Simple Object Access Protocol 1.1 (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) 2.0, XML 1.0 and XML Schema should interoperate. Security has been identified by many as the next major area for work in web services. Tom Glover, WS-I president and chairman, told ComputerWire he hoped the preliminary security working group would complete its work by March then make its recommendations to the WS-I board. A formal working group would then be established to develop the profile. The preliminary working group, chaired by Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc's Eve Maler can, if it chooses, outline which security specifications it believes should be used in the profile..."
[December 18, 2002] "Supply Chain Management Use Case Model." Edited by Scott Anderson (Visuale, Inc.), Martin Chapman (Oracle), Marc Goodner (SAP), Paul Mackinaw (Accenture), and Rimas Rekasius (IBM). WS-I Working Group Draft. Date: 2002/11/10. 28 pages. ['This is not a final document. This is an interim draft published for early review and comment.'] "This document presents a high level definition of a Supply Chain Management (SCM) application in the form of a set of Use Cases. The application being modeled is that of a Retailer offering Consumer electronic goods to Consumers; a typical B2C model. To fulfill orders the Retailer has to manage stock levels in warehouses. When an item in stock falls below a certain threshold, the Retailer must restock the item from the relevant Manufacturer's inventory (a typical B2B model). In order to fulfill a Retailer's request a Manufacturer may have to execute a production run to build the finished goods. In the real world, a Manufacturer would have to order the component parts from its suppliers. For simplicity in this application, we assume this is a manual process which is supported through the use of fax. Each use case includes a logging call to a monitoring system in order to monitor the activities of the services from a single monitoring service. The primary goal of the application is to demonstrate all of the scenarios in the WS-I Basic Profile..." [cache]
[October 30, 2002] "WS-I Publishes Basic Profile Working Draft. Now Available for Public Comment." Announcement 2002-10-29. "Today [2002-10-29] at the Gartner Group Application Integration and Web Services conference, Tom Glover, chairman of the Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') announced the availability of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Draft. The WS-I Basic Profile Working Group has made this working draft public in order to solicit feedback from the Web services community, with the goal of releasing a final version in early 2003. The WS-I Basic Profile Working Draft can be accessed at www.ws-i.org. 'We've met a major milestone by releasing the working draft ahead of schedule,' said Glover during his keynote address at the Gartner Group conference. 'hile the Basic Profile is composed of detailed guidelines aimed at helping developers build interoperable Web services, we expect that broad adoption of the profile will provide a level of confidence for executives making investment decisions about Web services and Web services products.' The Basic Profile consists of implementation guidelines recommending how a set of core Web services specifications (SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0 and XML Schema) should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. The following Web (1) Messaging: the exchange of Web service protocol elements, usually over a network (2) Description: the enumeration of the messages associated with a Web service, along with implementation details (3) Discovery: metadata that enables the advertisement of a Web service's capabilities (4) Security: mechanisms that provide integrity, privacy, authentication and authorization..." Details in the news item. [PR source .DOC]
[October 30, 2002] "WS-I Release Profile for Building Web Services." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (October 29, 2002). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) on Tuesday announced availability of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Draft, which features specifications and guidelines for developing interoperable Web services. The Basic Profile consists of implementation guidelines recommending how a set of core Web services specifications, including SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0, and XML Schema, are to be used for developing interoperable Web services. The WS-I Basic Profile Working Group is seeking public feedback on the draft, with plans to release a final version in early 2003. 'The Basic Profile is the first deliverable from the WS-I and it's essentially a set of guidelines for people building Web services applications to follow to make their applications interoperable,' said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services marketing at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., and a member of the WS-I marketing committee. WS-I is looking to follow up on work being done at standards bodies such as OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and bring Web services interoperability to fruition, VanRoekel said. 'We're looking to take work from standards bodies downstream,' he said. 'We coalesce [standards] into a way to build applications that are interoperable.' Component technologies are found within the scope of the Basic Profile for messaging, description, discovery, and security. Messaging is defined as the exchange of Web protocol elements, usually over a network, while description involves the enumeration of messages associated with a Web service and implementation details. Discovery includes metadata that enables advertisement of a Web service's capabilities, while security is intended to provide integrity, privacy, authentication, and authorization. The security element of the profile describes Secure HTTP, for example, but not the proposed WS-Security standard from OASIS, VanRoekel said. 'We're just not there yet. You have to solve the foundational issues first,' said VanRoekel..." See: (1) the text of the announcement, "WS-I Publishes Basic Profile Working Draft. Now Available for Public Comment."; (2) more detailed references in the news item of 2002-10-18: "Web Services Interoperability Organization Publishes Basic Profile Version 1.0.". [PR source .DOC]
[October 18, 2002] "WS-I Community Approves Board Expansion. 150+ Member Community Votes to Add Two Elected Board Seats. Nominations Set for January 2003." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') announced 2002-10-17 that its member community has approved the proposal to expand the board of directors and add two new elected seats. WS-I contributing members in good standing will be eligible to run for election. Nominations will be accepted beginning January 1, 2003 and must be received no later than February 15, 2003. Any company interested in running for board election will need to join the organization and participate in its work. Elections will take place in March 2003. The term for the newly elected directors will begin on April 1, 2003... "WS-I is the most important organization for ensuring that software from different vendors can communicate using Web services standards," said Ted Schadler, group director of research at Forrester Research. "The WS-I's important work is to rise above software industry politics and give CIOs and companies confidence that the software they're buying conforms with basic conventions of interoperability. Forrester believes that today's move by the WS-I to allow new members to gain board status will benefit the software industry and firms that rely on software." WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies by providing guidance, recommended practices and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services. Since its formation in February 2002, more than 150 companies have joined WS-I..." [source .DOC, PDF]
[October 17, 2002] "WS-I to Expand Its Board." By Stephen Lawson. In InfoWorld (October 17, 2002). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) said Thursday [2002-10-17] will add two seats to its board of directors, a move that may help heal a rift between the group and Sun Microsystems. The group of more than 150 companies, formed in February to foster interoperability of Web services software from different companies, Thursday announced it will elect two new board members next March. The member companies will be elected by the full membership and will have the same rights and responsibilities as the current nine board members, but they will serve limited terms. The nine current board members, including Microsoft and IBM, are permanent. The board expansion was proposed in June and has now been approved by the board's membership. The news brought a guarded welcome from Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., which in the past had indicated it wanted to be brought into the group as a permanent board member. WS-I expects to release by the end of this year a set of guidelines for how to use Web services standards in an interoperable way, a set of tools developers can use to test their software, and sample Web services applications. The new board seats were created to let more member companies participate in guiding the organization, said Rob Cheng, chairman of the marketing and communications committee of WS-I. The board is responsible for maintaining the goals and objectives of the organization and creating new working groups, which tackle particular issues, he said. Nominations will be accepted from Jan. 1, 2003 through Feb. 15, 2003. The new board seats will be open to any company that has been a member of WS-I for at least 90 days and belonged to at least one of its working groups for 60 days, Cheng said..."
[October 03, 2002] "Free WS-I Interoperability Tests Due in 2002." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (October 03, 2002). "Interoperability tests for Web services, to gauge the compatibility of different implementations, will be available for free from the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization by the end of this year, said an Oracle official Thursday. Specifically, WS-I will provide tools to test the conformity of Web services to basic profiles, said Rob Cheng, Oracle senior product manager of Oracle9i Application Server and co-chairman of the WS-I marketing communications committee. Cheng spoke of the WS-I plan during the Web Services Edge 2002 conference here on Thursday. If a Web service passes the WS-I test, 'It means it's compatible with any other Web service,' conforming to the profile, which will feature specifications such as UDDI and SOAP, Cheng said. Also to be released by WS-I is a set of best practices for interoperability and use case scenarios, Cheng said. Supply chain is one specific sample application to be released by WS-I, to test for attributes such as asynchronous communications between a manufacturer and a warehouse, said Cheng. Users can download the tools and test applications, according to Cheng... WS-I does expect users who have passed the compatibility tests to post results in a public place, he said. The only time users will have to sign an agreement to use the tests is if they want to integrate them into an interactive development environment, Cheng said..." See: "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."
[August 28, 2002] "Standardizing Web Services Nears Completion." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (August 28, 2002). "The effort to standardize the Web services arena is but six to nine months from completion, but the work necessary to implement all the standards to create a totally services-oriented architecture is at least a year to two years away, according to one IBM executive. Robert Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy, demonstrated at the XML Web Services One conference here interoperability between an IBM WebSphere-based Web services system and a Microsoft Corp. .Net Web services system. The scenario included a client, a brokerage house and trade desks at an institution, where each point was able to swap code between WebSphere and .Net. 'The demo showed the degree to which WebSphere and .Net could interoperate on a standard level,' Sutor said. The demonstration used the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), WS-Security and WS-Attachments... There is still work to be done on Web services security, but the recent move of the WS-Security specification into the OASIS standards organization should help to move that forward, according to Sutor. Indeed, he said, business processing, workflow, transactions and systems management are going to be big areas for the future. 'We'll be spending the next couple of years in standards organizations finalizing these things,' Sutor said. 'The standardization work will continue, but for the big picture we've only got six to nine months on this.' ... Meanwhile, Sutor said the Web Services Interoperability organization, which IBM founded with Microsoft, BEA Systems Inc. and other companies, has played a crucial role already in the Web services arena. 'With WS-I there's much better liaison between OASIS and the W3C..."
[August 26, 2002] "WS-I Sorts Out Web Services Specs." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (August 26, 2002). "With the number of Web services standards becoming an alphabet soup, enterprises are looking for assurance that the myriad specifications are interoperable. The Web Services Interoperability organization, or WS-I, is taking steps to help. The WS-I recently finished an internal version of its first set of guidelines -- or profiles -- called WSBasic, designed to assist enterprises in developing and running Web services. The beta version is scheduled for release in November, with general availability expected by the end of the year. The group, formed in February by Microsoft Corp., IBM, BEA Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and others, also wants to play a broker role for the various competing standards bodies, in particular the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)... Another key to standards interoperability is cooperation among the major standards groups. At the XML Web Services One Conference in Boston this week, the W3C and OASIS will discuss security standards for Web services. WS-I representatives said their group's profiles will give the standards bodies a middle ground to work around. The WS-I profiles are Web services specifications at specific version levels that include outlines about how they work together, according to Rob Cheng, a WS-I co-chairman and senior IPlatform product analyst at Oracle Corp., in Redwood Shores, Calif. WSBasic includes the core Web services specifications: XML Schema 1.0, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) 1.1, WSDL (Web Services Description Language) 1.1 and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) 2.0... Available with the alpha version of WSBasic are sample applications used to demonstrate Web services interoperating on various platforms -- including Windows, Solaris and Linux -- and tools to analyze and test interoperability, said John Kiger, director of Web services technologies at BEA, in San Jose, Calif., and a WS-I board member. Sample applications and testing tools will be beefed up as profiles evolve. WSBasic will be the building block for profiles that will include other standards, such as WS-Transaction and WS-Security, Cheng said. Additional profiles will address issues such as message extensibility, routing, correlation, guaranteed message exchange, signatures, encryption, transactions, process flow and inspection. The development of additional or updated WS-I profiles depends on the continued maturity of Web services specifications, Cheng said. WS-I representatives said they expect that vertical industries will build on the WS-I profiles by adding industry-specific standards to them..."
[August 20, 2002] "F5 Joins the Web Services Interoperability Organization." - F5 Networks, Inc., leading provider of Internet Traffic Management (ITM) products, today "announced it is the first ITM vendor to join the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to help influence and establish emerging standards for Web services. F5 shares WS-I's vision of promoting open standards for Web services interoperability, and is the only networking vendor to offer a fully integrated suite of ITM products that are Web services-enabled via F5's open iControl Application Programming Interface (API). 'We're excited to have F5 Networks join WS-I and welcome their participation in the various working groups,' said Tom Glover, chairman of WS-I. 'The goal of true interoperability can only be achieved with the participation of companies from a diverse set of industries. F5's participation will help to ensure that the deliverables WS-I produce will meet the real-world interoperability needs of businesses.' To successfully deploy Web services and mitigate the risks associated with these new applications, it is crucial that the application and network work in concert to avoid challenges with the availability, scalability, and security of mission-critical deployments. F5 Networks is the only networking vendor that enables applications and web services to 'speak to' and influence the behavior of the underlying global network via F5's open iControl architecture and API; accessible via SOAP/XML and CORBA interfaces to suit a variety of application requirements. Through iControl, each F5 networking device is a Web service provider and consumer offering comprehensive programmatic interfaces exposed via Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Through support for WSDL and SOAP/XML, iControl enables applications to monitor critical network information and combine it with application health and performance to adjust both application and network behavior for optimized scalability, availability, and performance. Further, support for Microsoft .NET and J2EE development platforms enables developers to leverage this API with familiar tools, speeding development and deployment..."
[July 29, 2002] "Vignette Joins WS-I, Adds Web Services To Content, Commerce Mix." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (July 29, 2002). "Vignette said Monday it has joined the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), hoping to lend its expertise in content management and e-commerce to the effort to standardize an approach to emerging XML-based applications. The WS-I organization is large and growing; the group counts more than 125 companies among its members. WS-I is aiming to develop implementation tools, guidelines, best practices, and online resources to help enterprises deploy Web services in the real world... Vignette is increasingly baking Web services support into its V6 content management and commerce platform. The product currently includes support for the XML Schema, Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standards. V6 also spans both J2EE and .Net platforms. Vignette said it plans to join the WSBasic Profile working group, which is defining how to use standards like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI as a foundation for Web services..." See details in the 2002-07-29 announcement "Vignette Joins Web Services Interoperability Organization. Vignette Supports Effort to Establish Greater Compatibility of Web Services Across Technologies and Applications."
[June 17, 2002] "Web Services Interoperability Standards: Accelerating Web Services Adoption." By Chris Kurt (Microsoft). May 15, 2002. Based on 14 slides. Presentation to the XML.gov XML Working Group. "The shift to Web services is underway [An Internet-native distributed computing model based on XML standards has emerged; Early implementations are solving problems today and generating future requirements; The Web services standards stack is increasing in size and complexity to match functionality requirements]. The fundamental characteristic of Web services is interoperability [Assumes consistency across platforms, applications, and programming languages]. What is needed? (1) Guidance [Implementation guidance and support for Web services adoption; A common definition for Web services] (2) Interoperability [Across platforms, applications, and programming languages; Consistent, reliable interoperability between Web services technologies from multiple vendors; A standards integrator to help Web services advance in a structured, coherent manner]..." Available also in HTML and PPT formats.
[May 16, 2002] "IBM Web Services Guru Predicts WSDL Future." By Gavin Clarke. In Computerwire (May 16, 2002). Also printed in The Register. "... IBM's director of e-Business standards Bob Sutor, predicts between 20 and 25 XML-based specifications for web services will eventually be defined by standards bodies like OASIS and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The good part? ISVs and customers are unlikely to implement all 25. Instead developers will mix and match, picking specifications to suit specific needs. WSDL will be the most widely adopted specification, to describe web services. On this latter specification, Sutor is emphatic: web services are defined by whether they are described in WSDL. 'Web services will be fundamentally WSDL based. You have to use WSDL to describe [a web service] and then you can build up from there,' Sutor said. 'There will be a tremendous amount of use for SOAP... but there may be a more optimized protocol.' Sutor believes the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization will help clear-up confusion over the remaining specifications. Sutor said WS-I will help to ensure interoperability between vendor's implementations of standards. WS-I will also corral groups of standards to suit specific functions, such as security. 'Once standards get implemented you get a different perspective of what you should have and what should have been settled, as people mix and match parts of a paper specification. That's where WS-I can contribute. The raw list of standards is just ammunition," he said..."
[April 18, 2002] "WS-I Announces Formation of Key Working Groups; Membership Grows to More Than 100. 100+ Member Community Meets for Initial Working Group Planning Sessions. AT&T, Proctor & Gamble, Sabre and Others Join Industry Effort." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') (http://www.ws-i.org) announced the formation of key working groups at the organization's first community meeting held this week in San Francisco. WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. More than 100 companies have joined WS-I since its official launch in February 2002... Working Group Charters Defined: WS-I has defined the charters for three initial working groups. (1) The Basic Web Services Profile Working Group will identify a core set of specifications (including XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) that provide the foundation for Web services, and will establish conventions and recommendations for coordinating their use. (2) The Sample Applications Working Group will provide sample applications of basic Web services to accelerate deployments. These sample applications illustrate best practices for implementation and will be developed in multiple programming languages using multiple development tools. Sample applications serve as working examples for companies planning to implement Web services. (3) The Test Materials and Tools Development Working Group will develop a suite of self-administered tests to verify conformance with the Basic Web Services Profile. These tools and materials can be used to ensure that Web services interoperate across platforms, applications and programming languages. WS-I is targeting a Fall release for the first set of working group deliverables... Membership in WS-I is open to all organizations committed to promoting interoperability among Web services based on industry-accepted definitions and open standards support..."
[April 18, 2002] "Web Services Body Adds 50 Members." By Wylie Wong. In CNET News.com (April 17, 2002). "AT&T, Cisco Systems, and Procter & Gamble are among the latest companies to join a key Web services standards organization aimed at promoting the emerging technology. The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) said Thursday that it has gained 50 new members, bringing its total membership to more than 100 companies. The organization's stated goal is to promote Web services and ensure that software from various technology makers is compatible. The group, created by IBM and Microsoft in February, is meeting for the first time this week in San Francisco to sketch out its objectives. In the next few years, analysts expect Web services to gain in popularity as a more efficient way to build software. Web services allows businesses with different computing systems to more easily interact and conduct transactions. But analysts and technology buyers warn that Web services won't catch on industrywide unless there is a widely accepted way of linking systems. In a two-day meeting that began Wednesday, organizers say, the WS-I has come up with three initial tasks and has created teams, or 'working groups,' to accomplish them by this fall, said Norbert Mikula, Intel's director of Web services technology and co-chair of WS-I's marketing committee. One team will identify the key specifications for Web services, including Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). It also will create the guidelines for using them to ensure compatibility, Mikula said. Those four specifications have emerged as key to making Web services work across multiple computing systems. To understand how these protocols work together, imagine an ordinary phone call. In Web services parlance, XML represents the conversation, SOAP describes the rules for how to call someone, and UDDI is the phone book. WSDL describes what the phone call is about and how you can participate... Still missing from the WS-I's list of supporters is Sun Microsystems... new members joining the WS-I include Hitachi, Unisys, Ascential Software, Bowstreet, Corel and SilverStream Software. Companies that originally joined included Compaq Computer, DaimlerChrysler, United Airlines and VeriSign..."
[April 12, 2002] "Market Scan: WS Interop Board Treads a Fine Line." By Paul Kapustka. In XML & Web Services Magazine Volume 3, Number 3 (April/May 2002), pages 12-13. Earlier version posted February 19, 2002. ['Will the recent formation of some industry heavyweights into one consortium bode well for progress in cross-platform standards?'] "Will the new Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization have greater success than earlier open-systems efforts that flashed and then fizzled? While there might be cause for skepticism, the recent history of agreements in the Web services arena suggests that further progress in cross-platform standards may be possible. Billing their creation as a 'standards integrator' for the Web services marketplace, a large group of vendors and enterprise customers -- including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle but not Sun Microsystems -- announced the formation of the WS-I Organization, a group meant to 'accelerate the development and deployment' of interoperable Web services. According to WS-I representatives, the group's main goal is to give guidance and reassurance to potential Web services developers and customers who may be hesitant to buy into the marketing claims already being attached to the various Web services product bandwagons. The WS-I also said it will not attempt to develop standards, but will instead endorse and encourage the efforts of existing standards groups... Bob Sutor, director for e-business standards strategy with IBM, said the WS-I's work will be crucial once Web services technologies move past the basic connection levels of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), XML, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) to include thornier topics like security and transaction support... Gartner's Natis, however, thinks the WS-I may be reaching too high with its stated plans for developing a technology 'road map,' or a list of product-interoperability profiles and 'best practices' for Web services deployment... The WS-I could prove useful, Natis said, if its members were able to reach a consensus on standards that do emerge in functional areas like security and transaction support, where there isn't the current level of agreement found for the basic communication technologies like SOAP and XML."
[March 20, 2002] WS-I Member meeting 2002-04-17/18. A posting of 2002-03-18 from Christopher Kurt (Secretariat, ws-i.org) announced that the first Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) Member meeting "will be held in the San Francisco area on Wednesday and Thursday, April 17th and 18th, 2002. [members-only event, limited space] Contact:
[March 13, 2002] "WS-I: Trying to Rise Above the Fray." By Michael Vizard and Steve Gillmor. In InfoWorld (March 12, 2002). ['As the standoff between Sun Microsystems and the founders of the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) looks like it's about to become a prolonged debate, executives from IBM and Microsoft in a rare joint public relations effort are making their case for WS-I. Sun insists that it should be given a position on the organization's board of directors because that is where the organization's agenda will be determined. The founders of the organization don't necessarily agree, given Sun's historic foot-dragging on XML and Web services in general. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Bob Sutor, IBM director of e-business standards strategy, and Neil Charney, Microsoft director of .Net platform strategy, claim that the organization's primary goal is to promote Web services interoperability rather than industry turmoil.'] [Charney:] "The first thing to note is that WS-I is not a standards body. Think of it as an organization that's really a standards integrator. From the perspective of a developer who's building Web services, as these things start to really move out into production, the specifications are being generated by a variety of standards bodies. So it's important to have a place for developers to go where a circle has been drawn around the various standards that are out there for this thing called Web services. It's really an implementor's forum, if anything. It's really an attempt to respond to customers telling us that they want to have some sense of confidence that the interoperability of Web services can be assured. The thing they've made very clear is that they want to see leadership and they want to see the various industry leaders align around a shared and common definition of Web services. Customers are looking for guidance and clarity, because there are a variety of standards efforts and standards bodies, and there's a tendency in our industry to not even have the conversation." [Sutor:] "We're not going to put 25 standards all in the W3C or in OASIS. There needs to be some sort of central industry community that helps to make sense of all that... Some subset of every community is always concerned with something. We went out with 55 companies supporting WS-I. There were in fact nine founders, including Oracle, who has done a little bit in the Java community, as well as BEA. We really went out of our way to make sure that we could get a lot of companies in there, and we invited a tremendous number of them. Sun will have to make up its mind about this. Sun is more than welcome. We are working our way through this list of 400-plus inquiries..."
[March 11, 2002] "Are Politics Eclipsing Sun from the Web Services Scene?" By Eric Knorr and David Berlind. In ZDNet AnchorDesk (March 11, 2002). "A month ago, Microsoft and IBM formed the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization, an industry consortium dedicated to promoting best practices for Web services. It's hard to overstate the WS-I's importance -- mainly because it's the first major industry organization devoted to Web services and boasts dozens of titans as members, including Accenture, BEA Systems, Compaq, Ford, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Qwest, SAP, United Airlines, and VeriSign. More practically, the WS-I is important because ensuring that Web services interoperate and conform to standards is absolutely vital. If they don't -- and Web services enablers or providers factionalize -- the whole proposition falls apart. Too bad the WS-I has already gotten off on the wrong foot. The reason: Sun Microsystems hasn't joined yet -- and the circumstances surrounding its absence smack of hardball politics. Although Bill Gates derided Sun for not signing on during his February 13 introduction of Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net, Sun was invited to join just days before--and then, according to Sun, only as a contributor, not as a board member or founder. In fact, Sun was only informed of the WS-I's existence by IBM on the evening of February 4 (see Web services push attracts a crowd) -- nine days before Gates's comments, and within 48 hours of the WS-I's February 6 launch. That's hardly enough time to do the necessary due diligence when a chief competitor approaches you about joining an industry group, let alone enough time for competitors to credibly rattle their sabers... According to Sun spokesperson Russell Castronovo, Sun sent the WS-I a request to become a board member three weeks ago and still hasn't received a response... The WS-I is reportedly holding its first board meeting this week..."
[March 08, 2002] "Tale of Two Rodneys." By Steve Gillmor. In InfoWorld Volume 24, Issue 10 (March 08, 2002), page 66. "... Ed Julson, Sun director of product management Java and XML technologies, told InfoWorld that WS-I 'is the exact opposite approach to the way standards should be developed.' Rather than submitting ideas or early technologies that may or may not be collectively tuned or even completely transformed into standards from where the technology emerges, Julson suggested Microsoft and IBM are developing the technology themselves then trying to push that through the standards body, more or less intact. Julson says WS-I goes a long way backward to proprietary technologies disguised as standards. Rich Green, Sun vice president and general manager Java software and XML technologies, sees it differently. 'Ed works in this organization and he's certainly entitled to his opinion. I'm in charge of defining Sun's strategy and approach with respect to [WS-I], so I'm giving you the actual Sun answer.' Green is supportive of WS-I, or at least a WS-I that includes Sun. 'If we have any concern at all, it is in fact whether or not the mandate that [WS-I] has defined for itself is broad and stringent enough to ensure interoperability. We do have some questions about the model of self-certification, and we're concerned that this body, if it's going to take out this piece of industry real estate, that it actually has enough teeth to ensure interoperability..."
[March 05, 2002] "It Starts with Standards: Laying Groundwork for the Next Generation of Innovation." Microsoft Presspass Feature Story. March 05, 2002. "... 'Companies today are recognizing and supporting the tremendous potential of XML systems to unify the computing landscape, [Christopher] Kurt [group program manager for Web services at Microsoft] says. 'If this trend continues, the next generation of technologies can truly take shape in an interoperable world. But the standards process hasn't always lived up to its altruistic intentions, Kurt acknowledges. 'The standards process typically involves a lot of negotiation and compromise to address multiple goals, and in those negotiations, features and options are often introduced to specifications that may not be needed,' he says. According to Kurt, some of these features may be underdefined, or may simply be redundant, duplicating functionality already in place. This can occur for trivial aspects of the specifications or very complex features. 'And to the extent that it occurs, while it may be good for moving specifications forward and reaching broad agreement, it doesn't really help customers in the long run, and it doesn't help us build interoperable solutions.' Enter the new Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Launched in February, WS-I aims to cut through some of the clutter and help the industry and its numerous standards bodies focus on more precisely defining protocols to enable the true interoperability that Web services will require. 'Ideally it should be possible to buy Web services technology from two vendors and have it work together out of the box,' Kurt says. 'But the way specifications are written today, there's not enough guidance for that to happen naturally. They're not precise enough. What WS-I aims to do is work across all of the standards organizations to help the industry get there as quickly as we can.' Kurt says that WS-I will function as a standards integrator, a touchpoint among all of the standards organizations that provides feedback about how the standards can be improved, which practices the industry is gravitating toward, which have proven most interoperable, and new requirements that need to be addressed. 'Some of the industry organizations are structured to have very strong internal consistency in what they do,' he says. 'But others are structured in such a way that it generally ensures they won't have consistency, and none of them are really structured to check their work with that of other organizations. WS-I provides a view across the dynamic array of standards organizations to help our customers figure out how all of these standards are going to work together.' It's an idea that apparently has many supporters in the high-tech community. In just a few weeks, WS-I has over 50 members, and has received requests from more than 400 additional companies around the world interested in participating. Many feel that WS-I represents the best of what the standards movement has to offer -- a truly egalitarian, democratic and community-oriented approach to clearing the hurdles along the path to interoperability..."
[March 05, 2002] "IBM Spells Out Web Services Strategy." By Rob Wright. In CMP VARBusiness (March 04, 2002). "Feeling the heat in the Web services market from top competitors such as BEA Systems, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, IBM on Monday highlighted its own Web services strategy, positioning itself firmly in between the competing Java and .Net standards while declaring that it is the true market leader in the emerging market. Officials from IBM Software Group and IBM Global Services, along with IBM software brands Lotus and Tivoli, fleshed out Big Blue's overall approach to Web services, one that focuses on open standards and support of both Java-based Web services and Microsoft's .Net platform. Most of the attention, however, was focused on IBM's middleware brands, specifically the WebSphere platform and application server, as the key to driving growth and adoption of Web services in the enterprise market. IBM officials say the company will invest $700 million in WebSphere this year, which grew rapidly in 2001 and gained significant market share against BEA's WebLogic application server, which was the market leader last year... To offer such a high degree of connectivity through WebSphere, IBM has rolled out support of all major technologies and Internet standards, which has been a key selling point for Big Blue's Web services push. IBM has been a major contributor to Java, J2EE and UDDI and offers strong support for XML, SOAP, WSDL -- even .Net. While IBM and Microsoft have two distinct and separate Web services strategies and product lines, the technology giants teamed up recently to form the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), a group focused on developing interoperable standards to connect multiple platforms, applications and programming languages. Accenture, Intel, BEA, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are also members of WS-I. 'The world is heterogeneous,' says Robert Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy at IBM. 'If customers buy our software and they can't communicate with Microsoft, BEA and other competitors, we fail.' IBM, however, will be walking a fine line with Microsoft. While Big Blue has attacked such threats as BEA, Sun and Oracle, the company is restrained with Microsoft because it sees opportunity around .Net, Microsoft's proprietary Web services platform. IBM officials say they're concentrating on getting Microsoft to support open standards, and it has worked to a degree. Along with forming WS-I, the two companies worked together on developing SOAP... IBM also pointed out that Java is the more popular technology for enterprises buying Web services. In addition, the company cited a recent survey from analyst firm Giga Information Group that showed 32 percent of customers say WebSphere is the most important Web services platform, compared with 22 percent for Microsoft .Net. Going forward, IBM says it will concentrate on developing standards with WS-I, which the company says has had membership inquiries from more than 450 companies, and offering solution providers and software developers more resources and support through its partner program and new partner initiative, WebServices on WebSphere..."
[March 01, 2002] "The State of Web Services." Interview with Bob Sutor (IBM). By Ellie MacIsaac (Assistant Managing Editor, WebSphere Advisor). In [XML Strategies] Advisor (February 28, 2002). ['Advisor recently spoke with IBM director of e-business standards strategy Bob Sutor about current trends in Web services adoption, and the standards integration work being done by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).'] "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is based on providing guidance and clarity both for the developers and the people making investment decisions. They need to know that the products, such as the tools, the runtime, and the Web services themselves are based on open standards. They also need to know which open standards the developers used, and if they used common industry practices to put them together. We want our customers to have the confidence to say, 'Alright, I can use that Web service. I know that will be compliant with what I already have.' We think that confidence will really speed up the adoption of Web services. We all agree Web services is a good idea -- it's hard to argue against it. Therefore, we want to get this technology into our customers' systems as quickly as possible, but they want the reassurance it'll do the job. They want to know that all these promises of interoperability are more than just marketing hype -- that this notion of interoperability is something they can concretely see and measure... We've started doing some preliminary work over the last year around the basic standards such as SOAP and WSDL, which are the basic ways for describing Web services. This organization's timing is very important. We think we're about to enter a period where there will be many more technologies coming into the standardization process. I mentioned some before -- security, reliability, and transactions -- but there are several more. So, we're at the point where the foundation for Web services, in terms of the basic connectivity, has been laid. We've clearly been talking about Web services a lot, and people at least have a vague idea of what Web services are. We want to make sure now that when we move off the basic platform for all the future standardization efforts that will take place in the different organizations, that interoperability is built in -- that it's a requirement from now on to make sure the standard coming from one place will work with the standard coming from another place. There are just too many different specifications to be handling them all in one place. The W3C will not do them all; OASIS will not do them all; same with the OMG, or any of the other big organizations. So, it's assumed that this standardization work will be done in a distributed way. So, we need a central organization, like WS-I, that's neutral and isn't affiliated with any of these organizations, and therefore isn't involved in any of the existing cross-organization politics. We're also neutral regarding programming languages; we don't say you have to do Web services with Java or C# or .NET. So, WS-I is an appropriately neutral industry body that can drive forward the roadmap for Web services to work in a complementary fashion with the standards organizations and finally make this notion of interoperability real..." [fcCG]
[February 26, 2002] "WS-I to Thrash Out Six-Month Timetable." By Simon Robinson [Special to searchWebServices]. February 26, 2002. "Following a high-profile launch at the beginning of February backed by 55 industry vendors, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) says it has already received over 400 separate inquiries about joining the group. The WS-I will convene for its first board meeting next week, when the nine founding members, along with an expected 100 or so participants, will thrash out the initial agenda and timetable. According to Bob Sutor, director of IBM's e-business standards strategy, the organization expects to issue its first set of guidelines for the implementation of 'basic' Web services within six months. However, despite describing itself as a body dedicated to customer education, awareness and adoption, Sutor says the WS-I will not be a certification or policing body for Web services... Announced on the February 7, the WS-I is a Microsoft- and IBM-led group that aims to help turn the considerable Web services hype into implementations that work regardless of the software platforms they are running on. Unlike other Web-based collaboration efforts, the building blocks of Web services -- XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL -- are supported by all major software vendors and, working in conjunction with standards bodies such as the W3C, OASIS and the IETF, the WS-I plans to advance the adoption of Web services by concentrating wholly on interoperability issues..."
[February 07, 2002] "Can We Really Harmonize Web Services?" By David Smith and Yefim Natis (Gartner Analysts). Gartner Viewpoint. February 7, 2002. "The Web Services Interoperability Organization, a consortium formed by several major information-technology vendors, seeks to address an essential issue surrounding Web services: the promotion of a set of standards enabling Web services to interoperate. However, the new consortium faces a number of significant hurdles, including dealing with various standards bodies as well as managing the threat of eventual vendor or user apathy. Without adequately addressing these and other political challenges, the group could fade into obscurity by the end of 2003. On the other hand, even with its limitations (a limited budget and as of yet no participation by Sun Microsystems), Gartner believes that the group can help boost Web services for the following reasons: (1) The group will bridge the gap between Microsoft and the 'Java community' through the participation of BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle. The organization will act as a 'standard integrator,' therefore bringing some coherence to the effort carried out concurrently by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), OAG (Open Applications Group) and other informal groups. (2) In addition to overcoming political differences, the promotion of uniform standards involving security and transactions will remain a challenge. (3) Powerful vendors such as BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will work to establish what Web services will and will not be. (4) The group will help educate the market in Web services and help implement best practices. (5) If the group succeeds and collects enough support and membership, it could emerge as the de facto standards body for Web services..."
