Page Two

: Building Block"> WSBasic will be the building block for profiles that will include other standards, such as WS-Transaction and WS-Security, Cheng said.

Additional profiles will address issues such as message extensibility, routing, correlation, guaranteed message exchange, signatures, encryption, transactions, process flow and inspection. The development of additional or updated WS-I profiles depends on the continued maturity of Web services specifications, Cheng said.

WS-I representatives said they expect that vertical industries will build on the WS-I profiles by adding industry-specific standards to them.

Guidelines are going to be important as enterprises step into the Web services world.

Ferdy Khater, managing director of enterprise application development at Houston-based Continental Airlines Inc., said the profiles could help developers working on applications or Web services in distributed computing environments. For instance, Khater said the guidelines, particularly for SOAP, could help developers recognize what changes might have been made to an object or a piece of code. "The initial start with Web services today shows that everything is working fine, so anything they do with standardization is only going to make things better," he said.

Richard Monson-Haefel, a Web services consultant from Minneapolis, is taking a wait-and-see approach.

"What matters is that the profiles eliminate the ambiguities in [Web services] specifications that cause interoperability problems," he said. "From a developers perspective, the objectives of the WS-I are laudable, but Ill wait to see something tangible before I get too excited about it."

Related stories:

New Java Protocol Could Give Sun Web Services Edge

Iona, Microsoft Test Web Services Interoperability

Sun Evangelist Questions Standards Process

Tech Heavyweights Lead Web Services Push