XML News from Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group has updated five working drafts:

Web Services Architecture

"This document defines the Web Services Architecture. It identifies the functional components and defines the relationships among those components to effect the desired properties of the overall architecture."

Web Services Glossary

This document defines various terms used in the various specs like "actor", "digital signature", and "SOAP receiver". The definition given of "Web Service" is

A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.

Web Services Architecture Usage Scenarios

This document describes a series of use cases like travel agent interactions with cutomers and EDI transactions.

Web Services Architecture Requirements

"This document describes a set of requirements for a standard reference architecture for Web services developed by the Web Services Architecture Working Group. These requirements are intended to guide the development of the reference architecture and provide a set of measurable constraints on Web services implementations by which conformance can be determined."

Web Service Management: Service Life Cycle

"This document describes the life cycle of a Web service, and of the processing of a request by a Web service."