News

WS-I promotes profiles to 'final material' status

• By John K. Waters
• September 3, 2004

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the publication of three new profiles. The long-awaited promotion of Basic Profile 1.1, Attachments Profile 1.0 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 to 'Final Material' status marks the start of work on testing tools and sample applications for those profiles.

The WS-I is an industry consortium formed to promote interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. WS-I profiles define sets of Web services specifications that work together to support specific types of solutions. The new profiles are designed to provide developers with mechanisms for building interoperable, attachment-enabled applications. The new profiles are currently available for download from the WS-I Web site (www.ws-i.org/ ).

'WS-I understood from its members that existing Web services attachment specifications were increasingly presenting interoperability difficulties,' says Chris Ferris, chair of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group, in a statement. 'The new profiles provide Web services developers with a flexible mechanism for creating attachment-enabled applications with predictable interoperability.'

Those that do not use attachments can be tested for conformance with a composition of Basic Profile 1.1 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. Basic Profile 1.1 describes how core Web services specifications should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. Specifically, the spec is a document that consists of a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, as well as clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of them, which promote interoperability.

A rearchitecting of the Basic Profile 1.0, the new profile relocates all binding-specific envelope serialization requirements to its own profile: the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. (The envelope is an XML structure for transmitting messages defined by the SOAP 1.1 spec.) Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 is derived from the Basic Profile 1.0 requirements related to the serialization of the envelope and its representation in the message.

SOAP Messages with Attachments (SwA) defines a MIME multipart/related structure for packaging attachments with SOAP messages. This profile complements the Basic Profile 1.1 to add support for conveying interoperable SwA-based attachments with SOAP messages.

WS-I is currently working to develop sample applications and testing tools for use with the newly approved profiles, officials from the organization said.

Since it was founded in February 2002, the WS-I has grown into a large and influential organization with more than 170 member companies, including IBM, Sun, Microsoft and most large Web services vendors.