Standards rain
Today WS-Policy was approved as a W3C Recommendation. With that we can now say that there are standard versions of the WS-* specifications for building secure, transactable, addressable and reliable web services that are policy driven.
As I see now that I never addressed my own post on WS-SecurityPolicy being up for approval as an OASIS standard (yes it was approved) a brief recap of the WS-* specifications approved as standards this year seems in order.
WS-SecureConversation 1.3 OASIS Standard
WS-Coordination 1.1 OASIS Standard
WS-AtomicTransaction 1.1 OASIS Standard
WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 OASIS Standard
WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2 OASIS Standard
WS-Policy 1.5 W3C Recommendation
WS-Addressing 1.0 Metadata W3C Recommendation
Quite a list! I’m sure I’m missing some and I left some related specifications to the ones above out of the summary. Of course this all builds on top of existing standards like SOAP and WSS.
Will there be more? Sure, things always continue to evolve. WS-Federation was just submitted to OASIS this year for example. So while this isn’t the end it is an important milestone.