WS-I Plans Security, Messaging, Other Profiles

The forthcoming WS-I guideline for implementing security in Web services will be based on the WS-Security specification currently before the OASIS standards body and will be finished in roughly one year, said Chris Ferris, chairman of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group and architect in the emerging e-business industry architecture at IBM. Ferris spoke at the XML Web Services One Conference in Boston on Tuesday.

Ferris said the development of additional "features" such as security and messaging on top of the Basic Profile 1.0 will enable more complex Web services transactions.

The WS-I will likely provide profiles for reliable messaging, policy, service-level agreements as well as transaction coordination, Ferris said.

The first WS-I security profile will guide developers in how to implement a variety of security standards and specifications including SSL, IPSec and HTTP authentication, Ferris said.

"You can take WS-Security and make it a service," said Ferris. "It'll take nine months of technical work, and we'll have a basic security profile in about one year."

Security will become more important as SOAP messages and Web services begin to cross corporate boundaries, said Harris Reynolds, engineer and technical evangelist at The Mind Electric.

Reynolds said the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that has been submited as a potential specification to OASIS will enable cross-enterprise Web services business process integration.

The WS-I was chartered last February to ensure the interoperability of Web services. Now that the Basic Profile 1.0 is completed, the WS-I will release later this month testing tools--message monitor and analyzer--to test and ensure Basic Profile 1.0 compliance.

One vendor and WS-I participant said at the conference that security and reliable messaging are important to enabling e-commerce.

"Reliable messaging will enable guaranteed message delivery for applications such as guaranteed order delivery," said Marc Goodner, a technology architect at SAP Labs. Goodner noted the WS-I will release sample applications based on Basic Profile 1.0 shortly after the tools are made available.