Policy: Web Services Interoperability

Purpose

The purpose of the policy is to increase the likelihood that myGrid services will interoperate with each other and with independently-developed web services.

Background

Web Services are a relatively new family of techniques, technologies and toolkits for loosely-coupled distributed systems. Various groups are attempting to standardize the necessary protocols, principally:

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)
• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

However, the technologies are immature and many necessary standards are either missing, in draft form only, ambiguous or incomplete. Thus different toolkits implement their own, sometimes clashing, understandings of the existing standards.

To address the problem, The Web Services Interoperability Organzation (WS-I) has attempted to identify a well-defined core of the most important standards and to define a single interpretation for aspects that are incomplete or ambiguous. It is intended that adoption of these proposals by different providers of toolkits, services and client applications will improve the likelihood that they will interoperate, and thus encourage and accelerate Web Services adoption and deployment adoption.

Policy

Web Services and Web Servce clients developed by the myGrid project shall conform to the following WS-I profiles and the standards identified within them, insofar as such conformance is supported by myGrid's chosen Web Service toolkits:

• WS-I Basic Profile 1.0a
  • Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1
  • Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition)
  • RFC2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
  • RFC2965: HTTP State Management Mechanism
  • Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1
  • XML Schema Part 1: Structures
  • XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes
  • UDDI Version 2.04 API Specification
  • UDDI Version 2.03 Data Structure Reference
  • UDDI Version 2 XML Schema
  • HTTP Over TLS
  • RFC2246: The TLS Protocol Version 1.0
  • The SSL Protocol Version 3.0
  • RFC2459: Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile
  • [[][]]

Particular consequences

The following consequences of this policy are within the control of the project:

Implementing the Policy

To be supplied

-- NickSharman - 29 Sep 2003