News

From the XML Web Services One Conference: Profiles will help in Web services building

• By Jack Vaughan
• August 12, 2003

[BOSTON, MASS.] -- At a luncheon panel at the XML Web Services One conference in Boston, industry players discussed the role of standards some two years into the Web services phenomena. Web services seek to create simpler ways to connect diverse applications but, like all new technologies, interconnection in the early going is a work in progress. Much attention has been focused on the Web Service Interoperability (WS-I) group's ongoing efforts to make Web services applications talk to one another.

"Customers want the vendors to provide interoperability, that is the goal of WS-I," said Rob Cheng, WS-I member and principal product marketing manager at Oracle Corp.

Moderator Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst at research firm ZapThink, asked what newly brewing WS-I means to users.

Bill Stangel, senior VP and enterprise architect at Fidelity Investments Systems Co., said such profiles cut down on the setup and test work that end users previously had to create for themselves. "Interoperability is everything to us. The profile helps us," said Stangel.

"When you have thousands of developers trying to go in the same direction, profiles are a huge thing," he explained. Test cases and prototypes can be readily produced using the WS-I profile, Stangel indicated.

Links:


News from XML Web Services One
www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7943

XML Web Services One Conference home page
www.xmlconference.com/boston/