Saturday, March 18, 2006

Web Services specifications for resources, events, and management backed by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft

HP, IBM, Intel & Microsoft have anounced on March 15, 2006, a roadmap titled: "Toward Converging Web Service Standards for Resources, Events, and Management". A very welcome step and hailed greatly by the Grid and Web Service community. The only big company missing from the scene is Sun - lets wait and see what stand they take on this as I assuem they were backing IBM on WSRF and related specs.

The efforts according to the roadmap, involves converging various overlapping specifications available for the similar purposes. e.g., every grid developer, architect is familiar with WSRF (Web Service Resource Framework) and WS-N (Web Service Notification); as these are the basis of the latest version Globus Toolkit (GT4), but there exists another competing set of specifications such as WS-Management, that the microsoft platform developers have to deal with.

Ian Foster, the grid guru and architect of various grid and web service related specifications has the following to say in his commentary:

The published roadmap suggests that the new specifications that are to be developed will include essentially all of the core concepts introduced back in 2001 in the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) [5] and subsequently incorporated in WSRF/WS-N [6]. So this initiative is good news: it promises to deliver what the Grid and Globus communities have been working towards for close to 5 years: industry-wide standards for Web Services-based systems management.

The strong commitment stated by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft to the concepts, mechanisms, and interfaces encoded in WSDM/WSRF/WS-N and WS-Man/WS-Transfer/WS-Eventing should provide developers and users with considerable confidence that this technology is here for the long haul.


I have not read the complete roadmap and will post back with more details once I am done with the piled up work. By that time, following are some relevant quotes from the roadmap.

The result [of the effort] will eventually provide an industry-wide set of standards for resources access and eventing that will be useful for many scenarios in management integration, manageability, and grid computing,


On a related note, I just read a news item that OASIS has approved WS-Security 1.1

More later ...

Links:
Roadmap specifications
Dedicated IBM Web page
Dedicated HP Webpage
Ian Foster's commentary on the roadmap
OASIS stamps approval on WS-Security 1.1


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