OASIS Members Approve Nine Web Services Standards

by Peter Galli on February 04, 2009 07:13pm

Members of OASIS, the international open standards consortium, have approved nine Web services specifications as OASIS Standards.

The WS Reliable Exchange (WS-RX), WS Transactions (WS-TX), and WS Secure Exchange (WS-SX) standards support reliable message exchange, coordinate the outcome of distributed application actions, and enable trusted relationships.

The three WS-RX standards - WS ReliableMessaging 1.2, WS ReliableMessaging Policy 1.2, and WS MakeConnection 1.1 - allow messages to be transferred reliably despite failures in software components, systems, or networks. They enable a broad range of features, including ordered delivery, duplicate elimination, and guaranteed receipt.

The three WS-TX standards - WS-Coordination 1.2, WS-AtomicTransaction 1.2, and WSBusinessActivity1.2 - describe an extensible framework for coordinating transactions across a mixed vendor environment, while the three WS-SX standards - WS-Trust 1.4, WS-SecureConversation 1.4, and WS-SecurityPolicy 1.3 - provide methods for issuing security tokens, establishing trust relationships, and allowing key material to be exchanged more efficiently.

All nine standards were developed under the Royalty-Free on RAND mode of the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights Policy, and participation in the WS-RX, WS-TX, and WS-SX Technical Committees remain open to all interested parties. You can read more in this OASIS release.

OASIS members include, among others, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Novell. Paul Cotton, the Partner Group Manager in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, says that the standardization of these versions of the WS-SX, WS-RX and WS-TX specifications is a major step that finalizes the core Web services standards.

"The Web services standards offer mature support for critical customer enterprise scenarios, whether the protocols are used alone or in combination, thereby scaling from simple to complex scenarios," Cotton says.

In its drive for interoperability between different implementations on various platforms, Microsoft'sInteroperability Technical Strategy Team is already participating as a code contributor to an Apache project: the Stonehenge incubator project, which has been approved as an incubator project within Apache Software Foundation.

The WSO2 and Microsoft have already contributed code for a web-services based sample application, known as StockTrader, to this effort.

StockTrader is also just the starting point for the broader goals of Stonehenge, which aims to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.