Years of customer experience with commercial Web services applications have made clear the need for a modular approach for describing required and optional extensions used by a service. Without this capability, it can be costly to rewrite an entire service whenever application needs change. According to an announcement today by WC3, Web Services Policy 1.5 can reduce this cost. "It connects the core Web services standards -- SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0, and XML Schema -- to a growing set of extensions that reflect industry needs and experience."

Building on the fundamental open Web services standards from W3C, Web Services Policy enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing metadata, and other scenarios, in modular fashion.

With Web Services Policy 1.5, SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disruption or requiring changes to lower level service descriptions. The extensions themselves (consisting of what are called "policy assertions") are defined by other specifications.

The W3C Web Services Policy Working Group invited implementers to demonstrate interoperability by evaluating software against the group's test suite. Ten implementations of Web Services Policy 1.5 helped confirm the maturity of the specification. The tests focused on security assertions, one of the most important use cases cited by industry.

Another use case, addressing metadata, is the focus of W3C's WS-Addressing Working Group. The two W3C Working Groups have collaborated to ensure that the Addressing Metadata Specification is aligned with the policy framework.

The W3C Web Services Policy Working Group also secured review from several OASIS Web Services Technical Committees (UDDI, WS-RX, WS-TX, and WS-SX) to ensure that Web Services Policy 1.5 would satisfy their use cases.

According to the W3C statement, Web Services Policy 1.5 is "a critical Web standard for extending the features of Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications."

Building on the fundamental open Web services standards from W3C, Web Services Policy enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing metadata, and other scenarios, in modular fashion. With Web Services Policy 1.5, SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disruption or requiring changes to lower level service descriptions. The extensions themselves (consisting of what are called "policy assertions") are defined by other specifications.