October 11, 2006

Web services notification standard gets nod
Filed under: SOA
OASIS on Wednesday announced its approval of WS-Notification version 1.3 as an official OASIS standard.

WS-Notification defines a pattern-based approach to disseminating information amongst Web services. The standard actually consists of three different specifications: WS-BaseNotificiation, for standard message exchanges; WS-BrokeredNotification, defining message exchanges to be implemented by a "Notification Broker," and WS-Topics, providing an XML model to organize classes of events. Also, WS-Notification leverages the WSRF (Web Services Resources Framework) standard from OASIS and is used in turn by the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM)standard.

AmberPoint, Fujitsu and IBM already have implemented WS-Notification, OASIS said.

Companies such as CA and Tibco Software endorsed the specification in prepared statements released by OASIS.

"WS-Notification provides an essential publish/subscribe event mechanism for higher-level, service-oriented management protocols such as OASIS WSDM. This standard will enable the IT community to further advance the flexibility, efficiency, and ease by which enterprises can maintain the health of their increasingly complex computing environments," said Paul Lipton, senior architect for the CA Wily Technology Division.

"The approval of WS-Notification is a significant milestone for developers and users responsible for SOA at their organizations. By standardizing the way events are communicated using open, as opposed to proprietary protocols, WS-Notification has become a key element to the foundation of service-oriented, event-driven enterprise architectures," said Matt Quinn, vice president of Product Management and Strategy at Tibco Software.

Boston, MA, USA; 11 October 2006 — OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved WS-Notification version 1.3 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WS-Notification defines a pattern-based approach for disseminating information amongst Web services.

"The purpose of WS-Notification is to standardize the way Web services interact using 'Notifications' or 'Events,'" explained Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "The new OASIS Standard offers a foundation for event driven architectures built using Web services."

"WS-Notification provides a standardized way for one Web service (or other entity) to disseminate information to another set of Web services, without having to have prior knowledge of those services," explained Peter Niblett of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Notification (WSN) Technical Committee. "It lets Web services participate in a pattern of interaction that's already frequently used for inter-object communications in other domains."

William Vambenepe of HP, co-chair of the OASIS WSN Technical Committee, agreed. "The event-driven pattern that's defined in WS-Notification is very similar to the one used by publish/subscribe systems from message-oriented middleware vendors and in many device management applications," he said. "There are many use cases for WS-Notification in the areas of system and device management and also in commercial fields, such as electronic trading."

The WS-Notification OASIS standard consists of three specifications: WS-BaseNotification; WS-BrokeredNotification; and WS-Topics. WS-BaseNotification defines standard message exchanges that allow one service to register or de-register with another, and to receive notification messages from that service. WS-BrokeredNotification builds on WS-BaseNotification to define the message exchanges to be implemented by a "Notification Broker." A Notification Broker is an intermediary that decouples the publishers of notification messages from the consumers of those messages; among other things, this allows publication of messages from entities that are not themselves Web service providers. WS-Topics provides an XML model to organize and categorize classes of events into "Topics," enabling users of WS-BaseNotification or WS-BrokeredNotification to specify the types of events in which they are interested.

WS-Notification was designed to fit well with related standards. It makes use of the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) OASIS Standard, and is, in turn, used by the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) OASIS Standard.

Amberpoint, Fujitsu, and IBM have all implemented WS-Notification either internally or externally (in keeping with the consortium's requirement that at least three parties assert successful implementation prior to OASIS Standard balloting). Fujitsu's implementation is available as open source tool through unicore.forge.net.

Participation in the OASIS WSN Technical Committee remains open to all; suppliers, end-users and system integrators are invited to join OASIS to advance the continued development and adoption of WS-Notification. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the wsn-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard.

Support for WS-Notification

CA
"WS-Notification provides an essential publish/subscribe event mechanism for higher-level, service-oriented management protocols such as OASIS WSDM. This standard will enable the IT community to further advance the flexibility, efficiency, and ease by which enterprises can maintain the health of their increasingly complex computing environments," said Paul Lipton, senior architect for CA's Wily Technology Division.

SOA Software
"Notifications represent an important decoupling mechanism in enterprise IT environments. Having a protocol-based specification supporting the interoperability of notification systems is important to businesses looking to realize the benefits of SOA in real-time computing," said Alistair Farquharson, vice president technology at SOA Software.

TIBCO Software
"The approval of WS-Notification is a significant milestone for developers and users responsible for SOA at their organizations. By standardizing the way events are communicated using open, as opposed to proprietary protocols, WS-Notification has become a key element to the foundation of service oriented, event driven enterprise architectures," said Matt Quinn, vice president of Product Management and Strategy at TIBCO Software.

Additional information:
OASIS WSN Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsn

Cover Pages Technology Report
http://xml.coverpages.org/computingResourceManagement.html