Members Approve WS-Context as OASIS Standard

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

** Link to this press release at
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-04-25.php **

Members Approve WS-Context as OASIS Standard 

ESI Acquisition, IONA, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and Others Define Open
Framework for Supporting Transactional Web Services Compositions  
 

Boston, MA, USA; 25 April 2007 -- OASIS, the international standards
consortium, today announced that its members have approved Web Services Context
(WS-Context) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the
highest level of ratification. WS-Context defines an open framework for
supporting coordinated and transactional compositions of multiple Web services
applications. The new standard is offered on a Royalty-Free basis, as provided
under OASIS policies.

"When Web services are used in combination, the ability to set the boundaries
of an activity (such as start/end or success/failure) and to inform
participants of changes to activities become extremely important," explained
Eric Newcomer of IONA Technologies, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services
Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) Technical Committee. "WS-Context
provides standard, interoperable ways to demarcate and coordinate Web services
activities. Business process transactions can be recovered predictably and
consistently with WS-Context, and the standard allows participants to define
their relationships with one another."

"WS-Context ensures that multiple Web services deployed in a variety of
execution environments behave as if they are deployed in a single, consistent
environment," added  Martin Chapman of Oracle, co-chair of the OASIS WS-CAF
Technical Committee. "For example, an organization's Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) may require security information, conversational session
information, database and file handles and process IDs, among other services,
to be shared across multiple execution environments built on different
platforms. WS-Context ensures that the Java, .NET, and other Web services in
the enterprise all behave similarly and as expected at runtime."

"A wide variety of applications that involve workflow or business-to-business
interactions will benefit from the composability that WS-Context delivers,"
observed OASIS president and CEO, Patrick Gannon. "We congratulate the members
of the OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee for their work in advancing this
important addition to the growing list of Web services standards."

WS-Context was developed by representatives of ESI Acquisition, IONA, Oracle,
Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and other members of OASIS.  Werner Enterprises, Red
Hat, and IONA all verified successful usage of WS-Context, in accordance with
eligibility requirements for OASIS Standards.   

WS-Context and the archives of the OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee are
publicly accessible. OASIS hosts the ws-context-dev mail list for exchanging
information on implementing the standard. 


Support for WS-Context OASIS Standard

IONA
"Shared state management across communication sessions becomes increasingly
important as SOA deployments incorporate a greater number of existing systems
and execution environments, and as Web services include additional qualities of
service. WS-Context is unique in providing support for both the SOAP header and
REST based approaches.  WS-Context is also unique in providing a common
mechanism for shared session state for such qualities of service as
reliability, availability, security, and transactions, to name a few.  The
approval of WS-Context as an OASIS standard is an
important step toward standardizing this important SOA capability," explained
Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA Technologies. 

Oracle
"WS-Context is a vital element to support compatibility of Web services by
providing a common mechanism to manage contextual data. As active participants,
Oracle is pleased to see its original contribution progressed through committee
and interoperability work to an approved OASIS Standard. This further
illustrates Oracle's commitment to driving industry standards," said Don
Deutsch, vice president Standards Architecture and Strategy, Oracle. 

Red Hat
"WS-Context is a key component of the evolving Web services architecture. Over
the years of its development, we've seen how using context is critical to
ensuring Web services retain the loosely coupled scalable nature and bridging
the gap between REST and Web services approaches. Red Hat is pleased to have
been involved with the technical committee and glad to see WS-Context become a
standard," said Mark Little, Director of Standards for Red Hat. 



Additional information:

WS-Context OASIS Standard
http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#wscontextv1.0

OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ws-caf/

WS-Context developers mail list
subscribe-ws-context-dev@lists.oasis-open.org
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/ws-context-dev/


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.
http://www.oasis-open.org


Press contact:
Carol Geyer
OASIS Director of Communications
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209 (office)
+1.941.284.0403 (mobile)