The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Services Architecture Working Group Tuesday published a new draft proposal intended to
help other working groups design Web services recommendations.
The group released the first draft of the Web Services
Architecture Usage Scenarios, a document which includes a collection of usage scenarios and use cases which illustrate the use
of Web services, and which are used to generate requirements for the Web services architecture, as well as to evaluate existing
technologies.
The purpose of the usage scenarios is to provide concrete examples of how specifications can be used for practical applications. A
few of the examples include:
- Updating stock quotes at set intervals using a “fire-and-forget” feature to send a message to multiple SOAP Receivers
- Exchanging business documents through a request/response message feature
- Allowing a server to return to return information requested by a server in multiple responses (possibly because the information
was not all available at once, which might be the case with a distributed Web search) through multiple asynchronous responses - Giving a sender notification of the status of data delivery to the receiver
- Using SOAP-based messaging to support a third party marketplace acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers
- Communication via multiple intermediaries while enforcing the non-repudiation property of the route
- Regularly updating online catalog pricing and removing older, cached price queries through a caching with expiration
feature.
The document remains a draft proposal, and the working group has not yet reached consensus on its contents.