Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:

webMethods Continues Commitment To Standards Leadership

webMethods Inc reaffirmed its commitment to Web services standards leadership with the announcement that it co-authored the recently published Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange) specification. The specification, released September 20 by webMethods, BEA, Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Sun, is an important building block in creating flexible and adaptable Web services-based systems. It furthers the promise of Web services to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating systems between different platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

WS-MetadataExchange provides a mechanism that allows Web services to discover information about each other. This information, or metadata, can describe Web services attributes, such as location, interface and policy requirements. WS-MetadataExchange defines a series of request-response interactions that allow Web services with no a priori knowledge of each other to exchange such metadata.

"webMethods is committed to help drive Web services standards, and the recent co-authoring of the WS-MetadataExchange specification advances this cause," said Andy Astor, vice president of Standards and Platform Strategies at webMethods Inc. "From its inception, webMethods has taken a strong leadership role in Web services standards development, and the company will continue to promote the adoption of specifications that fulfill the promise of ubiquitous Web services."

The specification authors are hosting a feedback workshop at webMethods' Sunnyvale, Calif., offices from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. PST on Oct. 14. The workshop is an open forum for specification authors to share background information on the design of the specification and to receive feedback from attendees.

webMethods maintains an active leadership position with several standards organizations, including the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the OASIS. In April, webMethods was re-elected to WS-I's board of directors. webMethods has been actively involved with WS-I for the past two years, exhibiting leadership as co-editor of the WS-I Basic Profile, chair of the Marketing and Communications committee, and a member of the Testing Tools and Basic Security Profile Working Groups and the Profile Composition and Attachments task forces.

webMethods is currently Chair for the W3C's Web Services Internationalization Working Group, and is a co-editor for WSDL 1.2, XML Schema and the W3C Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios. Within OASIS, webMethods is a co-editor of WS-BPEL and WS-Notification.

This current level of involvement is indicative of webMethods' rich history of commitment to driving Web services standards. The company was an original contributor to the SOAP specification with Microsoft in 1997 and co- authored and contributed WIDL -- the predecessor to WSDL -- to the W3C. webMethods is also a founding member to the UDDI advisory group and made major contributions to UDDI 2.0. Additional significant contributions to Web services standards includes, co-developer of XML Query Language, the predecessor to XPATH; lead architect to RosettaNet; co-author to Security Assertions Mark-up Language (SAML); co-author to XML Key Management System (XKMS); and co-author of the Open Management Interface (OMI) specification.