Supporting policy-driven behaviors in web services

Abstract

The Web services platform is gaining popularity as the technology of choice for integrating applications in diverse and heterogeneous distributed environments, such as the Internet. It is widely recognized that one of the barriers preventing widespread adoption of this technology is a lack of products that support non-functional features of applications, such as security, transactionality and reliability. Supporting such features in a service-oriented environment is more complex than traditional distributed computing environments since such behaviors cannot be assumed by applications, but some persistent representation of the behavior has to be discovered dynamically. WS-Policy has been touted as a possible future standard way to specify these features and associate them with services, but the multitude of related proposals resemble a poorly manufactured jigsaw puzzle more than a coherent vision.