News
Web services standards set for Grid
By Mike Bucken
A group of software suppliers led by IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. this week proposed new Web services specifications that officials said can be used to integrate Grid computing and Web services standards. The proposed standards, dubbed WS-Notification and WS-Resource Framework, are said to represent a common, standards-based infrastructure that can support business applications, Grid resources and systems management.
Officials from the sponsoring firms, which also included Sonic Software, Akamai, Tibco, SAP and the Globus Alliance, said the new specifications can provide a foundation for the Open Grid Services Architecture, allowing Grid infrastructures and applications to be built using Web services specifications. This will facilitate the ability of corporate users to access and share computing resources on demand over the Internet.
The specifications can extend the types of enterprise solutions corporations can easily deploy, said Karla Norsworthy, director of dynamic e-business technologies at IBM.
The WS-Resource Framework is said to include Modeling Stateful Resources with Web services; WS-Resource Properties that can define how data associated with a stateful resource can be queried and changed using Web services technologies; and WS-Resource Lifetime, which allows users to specify the period during which a resource definition is valid.