“W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities to Explore Next Web Services Layer”
XMLMania.com (10/12/04)World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) members are working on a Web services constraints and capabilities framework that will allow organizations to communicate the terms of their service. Requirements for using HTTP or the ability to support GZIP compression, for example, need to be communicated in a standard manner using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL 2.0) specification, SOAP, or HTTP. W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said more standards were needed to support automated Web services. Participants at a two-day W3C workshop on Web services constraints and capabilities were required to write a position paper stating how they would preferably communicate constraints and capabilities in regards to reliable messaging protocol requirements, encryption using WS-Security or other security mechanisms, and an attached P3P privacy policy. Besides discussing how best to implement such constraints and capabilities requests and what vocabularies to use, the workshop participants also discussed their framework’s impact on and relation to other W3C protocols and Web technologies. Upcoming W3C recommendations include WSDL 2.0, which is currently in the “last call” stage and will be extended by the constraints and capabilities framework. SOAP 1.2 is also nearing completion, having advanced to candidate recommendation status in August 2004.
