The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I)
organization Tuesday took another step toward its goal of helping
enterprises sort out Web services specification when it published the
Web Services Basic Profile (WSBasic) working draft.
San Francisco-based WS-I seeks to be the umbrella organizational body that helps the various
standards bodies, like the Organization
for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
coordinate their efforts on XML Web services. Last week, the organization
healed a large rift in the Web services community when it brought major
holdout Sun Microsystems into the
fold.
WSBasic consists of implementation guidelines recommending how the 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 intent of the Basic Profile is to cover:
- Messaging: the exchange of Web service protocol elements, usually over
a network - Description: the enumeration of the messages associated with a Web
service, along with implementation details - Discovery: metadata that enables the advertisement of a Web service’s
capabilities - Security: mechanisms that provide integrity, privacy, authentication
and authorization.
“We’ve met a major milestone by releasing the working draft ahead of
schedule,” said Tom Glover, chairman of WS-I, during his keynote address at
the Gartner Group Application Integration and Web Services conference in
Chicago Tuesday. “While 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.”
Neil Charney, Microsoft’s representative to WS-I, added, “The Basic Profile
is an attempt to draw a circle around the various specifications out there
that together create a basic Web service.”
He explained that WSBasic clearly delineates a baseline definition for Web
services, creating a foundation for all of the work taking place around the
technology. “One of the key requirements is that the vendors understand a
common and consistent definition of Web services and that customers
understand it,” he said.
The need for broad industry adoption of standards is clear, according to a
joint
study by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and
Systinet, released earlier this month. The study, based on 790 responses,
found that a third of respondents had live Web services deployments and
nearly a third were at an early experimentation stage. Also, 78 percent of
respondents said Web services would become a significant part of their IT
architecture within two years. Even so, nearly 90 percent of the
respondents listed “immature standards” as a technology risk to Web
services.
“The Web Services Interoperability Organization is founded to address the
essential issue surrounding Web services: the promotion of a set of
standards and guidelines enabling Web services to interoperate,” said Yefim
Natis, vice president and research director at Gartner Group. “Gartner
believes that assured Web services interoperability across products of all
Web services vendors would help to build credibility of Web services as a
strategic technology choice for mission-critical enterprise computing. The
availability of the Basic Profile Working Draft is the first step in the
right direction.”
WS-I is now seeking feedback on
the published working draft, and hopes to have a final version ready in
early 2003. In the meantime, it plans to release early versions of a number
of tools by the end of the year, including testing tools for monitoring and
analyzing interactions with a Web service in order to determine conformance
with WSBasic, use cases and usage scenarios that define distinct classes of
real-world business and technical requirements for Web services, and sample
applications that demonstrate best practices for the implementation of
applications based on WSBasic.
“We’re all very encouraged with the time frame in which these deliverables
are being introduced,” Charney said.
