Summary

In this chapter, we took a quick look at the current specifications in the GXA portfolio. A lot of work is still going on in the Web services arena, so these specifications are not the end of the story.

In many cases, the GXA specifications provide only basic frameworks; other specifications must be defined to show the true worth of the GXA specifications. You saw this when we looked at the reliance of WS-Transaction on the WS-Coordination specification—WS-Coordination provides a framework, and WS-Transaction builds an implementation on top of it. In addition to Microsoft and IBM, a whole host of other companies and organizations are extending the specifications. For example, the OASIS WS-Security Technical Committee (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wss) is working on the use of different security tokens in the WS-Security specification. The WS- Security specification currently defines the use of X509 certificates and Kerberos tickets; OASIS is working out the details of using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF) and numerous other security tokens within the WS-Security framework.

In addition, it is all but guaranteed that the current specifications will be modified. Some of the earlier specifications have inconsistencies that need to be ironed out—we’ve already seen this with the first addendum to the WS-Security specification.

A lot of the specifications will also be reworked to remove inconsistencies caused by later specifications and to take advantage of the facilities available in the later specifications. For example, the WS-SecurityPolicy specification updated the WS-Security specification to be compatible with the WS-Policy specification. And with the release of WS- Addressing, we now have a common way to reference Web services; the earlier specifications can now abandon their own way of referring to Web services and use the common reference mechanism defined in WS-Addressing.