News

Web services management spec work underway

• By Rich Seeley
• March 12, 2003

Developing an XML-based standard for managing the ''reliability, availability and serviceability of Web services'' is the goal of a newly formed OASIS technical committee, according to committee co-chair Winston Bumpus.

From the practical IT perspective, the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee will address the issue of how to be sure Web services are operating when an application needs them, he said.

While security is in the spotlight, Bumpus said providing ''basic network management and monitoring functions'' for Web services are equally critical issues that need to be addressed.

As he envisions it, once the WSDM (pronounced ''wisdom'') standard is completed and adopted by the industry early next year, Web services applications can operate in an architecture featuring a business port and a management port.

''We're used to Web services having a port for business activities, so it's a way you reach that service and it provides business functionality,'' Bumpus explained. ''Along those same lines, there needs to be another port defined for the management of that service. So basically as applications get developed under this new paradigm, one of their access ports to that service will be for the business function and the other port will be for the management capability of that function.''

Bumpus, director of standards at Novell Inc., said the committee has more than 50 members, including representatives from Actional, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Confluent Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, OpenNetwork, SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems, Waveset and webMethods. The committee is co-chaired by Heather Kreger of IBM.

Bumpus said the group expects to complete a draft WSDM standard approved by the full committee by January 2004.

For more information go to http://www.oasis-open.org/.