Oracle Corporation has announced its support for the newly formed Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organisation (
www.ws-i.org
), a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate the development and deployment of interoperable Web services across a variety of platforms, applications and programming languages.
WS-I addresses the key issue of interoperability, which is seen by many industry watchers as being instrumental in moving Web services to the next level of acceptance and adoption.
"Web services are a platform and language-independent means of building distributed systems that can connect and interact with one another easily and efficiently across the Internet, based on industry standards," says Marc Gower, marketing director at Oracle SA.
To assist in ensuring interoperability of Web services, WS-I will initially create a suite of tools and materials for testing implementation and conformance with "basic level" Web services standards: XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
Oracle is a founder member of WS-I. Other members include Accenture, BEA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and SAP. It is open to all organisations committed to promoting interoperability among Web services based on industry-accepted definitions and open standards support.
"Apart from articulating a common industry vision for Web services, the key mission of WS-I is to guide and support companies looking to deploy Web services," adds Gower. "A secondary - but equally important - goal is to promote consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services."
Supporting this view, Daryl Plummer, Group vice president and Research Group Director at Gartner, said: "Ensuring that Web services implementations interoperate across heterogeneous platforms is crucial to furthering the evolution of Web services and driving customer adoption."
The following companies are signing on in support of WS-I: AutoDesk, Cape Clear, Compaq Computer, Core Change, Corillian, Daimler Chrysler, Dassault Systems, JD Edwards, Epicor, ESRI, Flamenco Networks, FileNET, Grand Central Networks, Inc., Groove Networks, Iona, Kana, Macromedia, McAfee, Pivotal, Plumtree, Qwest Communications, Rational, Real Names, Reed Elsivier, Reuters, Toshiba and Versata, Inc.
About WS-I In recent years, technology leaders and industry standards bodies have worked together to develop a set of specifications for a distributed application architecture commonly referred to as Web services.
Web services standards including SOAP, XML, WSDL and UDDI have successfully enabled developers to provide interoperability across multiple platforms, programming languages and applications.
WS-I is a global organisation of industry participants with a wealth of Web services implementation experience that is committed to customer education, awareness and adoption.
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