W3C promises improved addressing for web services messages

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today that Web Services Addressing 1.0 (WSA 1.0), consisting of the Core specification and the Soap Binding, has been accepted as a W3C Recommendation.

The organisation said that the endorsement would offer the industry a reliable, proven interoperable standard to address web services messages.

"WSA 1.0 provides a mechanism to developers on how to address objects for web services applications," explained Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C architecture domain leader.

"It extends the capabilities of web services by enabling asynchronous message exchanges, and allowing more than two services to interact."

WSA 1.0 is designed to provide a transport-neutral mechanism for addressing objects in web services applications built on top of the Uniform Resource Identifier. The technology is dubbed an Endpoint Reference (EPR).

EPRs serve as a key component of web services specifications developed in a variety of different standards and industry organisations.

The W3C work aims to ensure that these diverse groups have a universal starting point with regards to addressing web services messages.

In addition to the addressing function of EPRs, the W3C explained that they can perform a role similar to that of a cookie for web services interactions.

Another special feature of EPRs is referred to as a 'metadata bag' which allows for additional information, whether it be a policy statement, a WSDL description, or semantic web data, to be included with the EPR.

Along with the core specification, the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group issued an accompanying Recommendation, Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Soap Binding.

The Soap binding provides instructions to developers interested in implementing web services addressing with either the W3C standard Soap 1.2 or the earlier Soap 1.1. It specifies security considerations to use web services addressing safely.