I recently wrote about the magic of the Waiting for the Easter Bunny last time with respect to the goodies that it may bring to web services specifications and standards. The easter went by and provided many chocolote eggs for children and children want-to-bes. Let me help you find yet another egg so that you don't miss it.
W3C just announced the submission of WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment specifications to the w3c. The submission is available in the following link. These specifications will enable the usability of web services by making constraints and capabilities of services explicit. SAP is an author of these important specifications.
The submission to the w3c is the step towards standardization for ensuring interoperability and adoption. After all, one can expose application functionality as web services but when it comes making the service functionality usable with different capabilities, an explicit and interoperable way of declaring the capabilities as well as an agreed processing model is needed for the industry. WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment specifications provide this needed functionality. Given that domain specific assertions are already being developed by various communities such as WS-ReliableExchange, WS-TX, WS-SX, the standardization of the Policy framework, grammer and attachment capabilities will complete the picture for making web services real.
