Boston, MA, USA; 24 April 2006 - The OASIS international standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WSRF provides a generic, open framework for modeling and accessing stateful resources using Web services. The WSRF OASIS Standard comprises a set of royalty-free, interoperable, and modular specifications that make it easier both to define and implement a Web service and to integrate and manage multiple services.

A Web service is characterized by the messages that flow to and from it. Any resource manipulated by the service, such as a shopping cart at an online retail site, needs to be identified and described by the messages that are exchanged.

"WSRF solves the problem of how stateful resources can be represented and managed using Web service technologies," explained Ian Robinson of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee. "In particular, WSRF addresses the requirements of the Web Services for Distributed Management (WSDM) OASIS Standard and other industry standards to expose and operate on fragments of a resource's state, which is essential in resource-constrained or low-bandwidth environments."

David Snelling of Fujitsu, co-chair of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee, added, "The WSRF OASIS Standard provides a platform for many higher level WS Service applications including, but not limited to, management and Grid Computing infrastructures. Using WSRF, companies can provide a standardized, interoperable platform for resource-based Web services."

WSRF is already experiencing a high degree of acceptance in the marketplace, including the open source community. "We already have thousands of people coding to the Globus implementation of WSRF," said Dr. Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago, and a leader in the Globus Alliance, developers of the Globus open source implementation of WSRF. "The finalization of WSRF as an OASIS Standard will help accelerate adoption for interoperable distributed systems."

"The WSRF OASIS Standard was developed to help simplify Web Services and make them more flexible. Together, WSRF and Web Services Notification (WSN), which is also advanced at OASIS, are enabling a closer connection between the Grid services and Web services communities," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "We congratulate the members of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee-as well as those who participated in the public review and who have already implemented WSRF--for all their work in advancing WSRF as an OASIS Standard."

The OASIS WSRF Technical Committee remains open to new participation. All interested parties are encouraged to exchange information on implementing WSRF via the wsrf-dev mailing list (http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/). As with all Consortium projects, archives of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee's work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment on the standard.

Support for the WSRF OASIS Standard

CA
"By providing an open, broadly accepted standards-based mechanism to access representations of state across complex environments, the OASIS Web Services Resource Framework will provide a useful foundation that will increase the utility and manageability of Web Services to meet changing business challenges," said Muhi Majzoub, vice president of engineering, enterprise systems management--applications at CA. "CA will continue to work closely with OASIS to develop workable standards that enable our customers to optimally utilize available information resources and streamline the management of their increasingly complex IT environments."

Fujitsu
"Fujitsu, as a leading provider of enterprise systems, their management infrastructures and a strong supporter of open standards in the field, welcomes the publication of the WSRF standard suite of specifications. Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories have been involved in the development of these specifications and interoperable implementations from the beginning and look forward to their wide-spread adoption in the industry," said Yoshiyuki Tanakura, Corporate Senior Vice President of Fujitsu.

IBM
"Our customers are already seeing the benefits of large-scale SOA deployments," said Karla Norsworthy, vice president, software standards, IBM. "The WSRF OASIS Standard provides the mechanism for describing the resources in these distributed IT infrastructures, including devices and services. This will simplify the task of integrating systems across and between enterprises. For example, this enables distributed management standards such as WSDM to have visibility to resources and their status."

Additional Information

OASIS WSRF Technical Committee

About OASIS:
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. The consortium produces open standards for Web services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. Approved OASIS Standards include AVDL, CAP, DITA, DocBook, DSML, ebXML CPPA, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registry, EML, OpenDocument, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI, WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRP, WS-Security, XACML, XCBF, and XML Catalogs. http://www.oasis-open.org

Press contact:
Carol Geyer
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