Web Services, Web Services Standards:  Status Report

This was a very busy week in the Web Services business.  We thought it might be a good time to take a deep breath, exhale slowly, and try to give you a status report.

Standards

We must love standards – we seem to endorse so many of them.  It’s good if it’s about extending Web Services up a steadily more defined and agreed upon infrastructure and applications stack.  It’s bad if it’s about competing standards and market fragmentation. After all, Web Services is all about interoperability.

IBM, Microsoft, And Verisign And Ws-Security

This week IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign submitted a web services Security Specification to OASIS for standardization.  It would provide web services standards to support, integrate and unify multiple security models, mechanisms and technologies, allowing a variety of systems to interoperate in a platform- and language-neutral manner.  The standard submission is supported by a number of major industry players including Baltimore Technologies, BEA Systems, Cisco Systems, Documentum, Entrust, Inc., Intel Corporation, IONA, Netegrity, Novell, Oblix, OpenNetwork, RSA Security, SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Systinet.  All of the standard’s supporters have expressed interest in participating in the OASIS development effort.

The security standard is a kind of low-level platform, providing a base on which a variety of security vendors can build their unique features.  This guarantees lots of buy-in but makes it harder to see exactly how much compatibility is actually going to be insured.  (This problem is not unique to security, but pervades the Web Services standards arena.  Low level standards are easier to get agreement for, but less useful for insuring easy interoperability.)

According to an IBM spokesperson involved in the submission, the next step will be for OASIS to seek comment and to name a Technical Committee to review the standard.  A meeting is expected in August.  While schedules for implementing standards are hard to predict, with broad support and interest, it is likely that this effort should get underway quickly.

What’s interesting to note here is that Sun is an active co-supporter with IBM and Microsoft of this Web Services Standards submission.  Meanwhile, Sun is busily refusing to join in the WS-I efforts, insisting that it will not join unless it is granted Founding Board Member status (which seems to not be in the cards, based on the current game plan, which has two board seats being added, but on a rotating two-year basis, rather than the permanent board seats granted to founders).

SUN And WSCI

Also, this week, Sun put forth a Web Services standard submission, together with BEA, Intalio, and SAP.  Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) is a new XML-based specification that facilitates web services interoperability.  In that sense, it could be considered competitive to WS-I.  However, where WS-I focuses on the issue of profiles and best practices, WSCI provides an interface to describe the flow of messages of a web service, intended to make it useful in a business process.

The WSCI specification is intended to be more descriptive than WSDL so it goes beyond describing the functions of services and describes how the functions relate to each other.

The specification can be viewed at the WSCI partners’ web sites.  Also, Sun released a Choreography Interface Editor, to assist solution providers and developers in becoming familiar with WSCI, available for download at the Sun site.

Sun and the companies that developed WSCI hope to submit the spec to a standards body such as the W3C once companies have had a chance to review WSCI.  Sun says openly that is hoping that its role in WSCI will make it clear that it expects to play a leadership role in Web Services and Web Services Standards.  It obviously is unhappy at the outsider role it feels the WS-I situation has placed it in.

You will note that Microsoft and IBM are conspicuously absent from this one.

And Then There’s ebXML

In the meantime, we spent a good bit of time in New York with Simon Phipps and Jon Bozak of Sun, talking about Web Services in general, Sun’s status in Web Services and Standards, and ebXML.  Sun is concerned that IBM, originally a big supporter of ebXML seems less interested now in continuing work on the standard, designed as a kind of alternative or replacement to EDI for cross-company transactions.  Sun wants to continue to add additional definition.  IBM seems focused on other issues.  We’ll hope to talk to IBM soon and see whether there’s another side to this story.

More About Web Services

And in the meantime:

The Web Services Edge Conference, co-occupying the Javits Center in New York City with TECHXPO was, as they say, small but choice, filled with small companies with big ambitions.  As usual at this stage of the game, it’s mainly about development tools and tools to manage tools.  Applications will have to follow. 

Most of the companies we talked to said their customers were still in the planning stages or were, at most, using web services for gluing together heterogeneous legacy applications. But not everyone agrees with this point of view.  For a very different take on this, have a look at what my colleague Phil Wainewright has to say about Web Services Claptrap, in which he disclaims this use of web services and urges developers to move on and build new applications.  You can see what Phil has to say at: http://www.philwainewright.com/ebiz/mscn2002-04-02.htm.  

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