OASIS announced Feb. 5 that its members have approved new versions of nine Web services specifications as OASIS standards.

The nine standards fall into the WS-RX (WS Reliable Exchange), WS-TX (WS Transactions) and WS-SX (WS Secure Exchange) families of specifications—three standards in each category. The WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX standards support reliable message exchange, coordinate the outcome of distributed application actions and enable trusted relationships.

OASIS officials said these standards now include updated references to the latest versions of all cited specifications, enhancing their composability and stand-alone use. Their approval marks a milestone in the maturity of Web services technology, OASIS said. According to the standards organization:

Three WS-RX standards—WS ReliableMessaging 1.2, WS ReliableMessaging Policy 1.2, and WS MakeConnection 1.1—enable messages to be transferred reliably despite failures in software components, systems, or networks. They enable a broad range of features, including ordered delivery, duplicate elimination, and guaranteed receipt.

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Three WS-TX standards—WS-Coordination 1.2, WS-AtomicTransaction 1.2, and WS-BusinessActivity 1.2—describe an extensible framework for coordinating transactions across a mixed vendor environment.

Three WS-SX standards—WS-Trust 1.4, WS-SecureConversation 1.4, and WS-SecurityPolicy 1.3—provide methods for issuing security tokens, establishing trust relationships, and allowing key material to be exchanged more efficiently.

"Working together, these standards provide a level of consistency across multiple services that is critical as customers move core business processes to SOA," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates. "WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX standards offer developers a sophisticated switchboard of services to support the complex interactions required by today's enterprise."

Laurent Liscia, executive director of OASIS, said, "The WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX standards were designed to be implemented individually or in combination with one another, so they can be tailored to meet specific SOA [service-oriented architecture] requirements. These new versions of the specifications reference each other where appropriate to enable easy composability amongst themselves and other Web services standards."

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Among the organizations involved in approving the standards were IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, BMC, CA, Intel, Nokia, Novell, Progress Software, Red Hat, SAP, SOA Software, Software, TIBCO, VeriSign and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration.

"The approval of the Web services standards produced by the WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX Technical Committees represents a significant milestone with contributions from a broad coalition of companies," said Karla Norsworthy, IBM vice president of Software Standards. "Our customers continue to look to the Web services architecture to provide robust, enterprise-ready technology for their SOA deployments. Transactions, reliable messaging and security are critical capabilities … The versions of the specifications being approved today add important support for the Web Services Policy specification from the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium], which enables applications to exchange information for requirements such as security provisions, transaction behaviors and reliable delivery of messages between endpoints."

And Paul Cotton, partner group manager in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, said, "The standardization of these versions of the WS-SX, WS-RX and WS-TX specifications is a major step that finalizes the core Web services standards. By aligning references across these OASIS Standards and the W3C WS-Addressing and WS-Policy Recommendations, these standards encourage even more interoperable vendor implementations for Web services messaging, security, policy, reliability and transactions."