Customers always tell us they want open standards that work, yesterday. With last weeks news about WS-Addressing going in to the W3C, most of the public might not realize they are actually watching the end of an exhaustive standards development process - even though last weeks big news comes across as only the start of a new W3C process. The end result though of this new development process (which took a lot of lessons from the practice of developing software) is probably delivering better, more technically solid standards much quicker than the conventional standards development processes; with probably less customer grief in the end – and it still can help today’s standards bodies do their thing.

 

First of all, right up front, there’s been a few questions about web service specs but have a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/understanding/specs/wslicensing.aspx and I think you will see it’s pretty clear that “Microsoft is committed to license its essential technology on royalty-free, and other reasonable and non-discriminatory terms”.

 

So, if we can all get beyond some competitors marketing FUD and look at what is really going on with how the web service standards are being developed, you’ll see it’s not your “normal” standards process; i.e. launch a committee, politically pick a chair, generate lots of hype and expectation on how this spec will solve world hunger, stack the new committee with people who may be able to contribute, host conference calls and arm wrestle the original idea down to some compromise that seems to make sense, then hope someone’s got a number of free weekends over to write up a draft of the new spec.

 

I think it is pretty obvious to anyone who has been involved with making standards (and still has a full head of hair) that especially these days it takes an increasingly large amount of effort, resource and time, to build the new big technical specs. The demand for standards to be available at an ever quicker pace and of better quality, than in the past, has even caused some standards bodies to try to find ways to instigate ‘fast track standards approval’ processes for their members. Terms like ‘no free lunch’ and ‘no one ever promised making standards was a quick process’ still come to mind though, and bottom line is it still takes a lot of work to make a standard easy to use; and practical.

 

It’s a fact these days. Most standards bodies don’t have the type of big development budgets and a large developer staff who can spend the necessary months or even years of constant technical work to not only write up a draft spec but also go through the process of aligning their technical designs with their competitors to get cross industry consensus; let alone go the extra mile and get through interoperability testing with your commercial competitor.

 

What Microsoft, IBM and other industry leaders have been doing for some time now as a key part in creating the new web service standards has been to work with a community “web services protocol workshops” process to get the new standards out. As time goes, on, I think it is going to become more apparent to everyone from the deliverables, that this approach is a better standards development process. You can find more info about the Workshop process (plus past and coming Workshops!) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/community/workshops/default.aspx but basically these workshops are about getting major technical industry players all behind developing common, open web service standards.

 

To save you a bit of reading time. There are two types of Workshops: Feedback and Interop. In Feedback Workshops, the web service spec authors discuss the content of the specification and solicit feedback from all attendees. In Interop Workshops, companies with implementations of a particular Web Service specification come together to test the interoperability of their implementations with others; i.e. don’t shop up unless you’ve brought your laptop.

 

So, why no big (hype) promotion of the Workshop process before? Well, all the material is public and there have even been some news articles in the past on the workshops that I seem to remember – but maybe it’s not really big news when you find Microsoft, IBM and other industry leaders getting together to work together?! From Microsoft’s perspective, we’re not trying to “do standards for standards sake” but use a standards approach to get the industry on the same wavelength.

 

 In terms of Microsoft’s public position, it should be obvious that we don’t publicly speculate on the new web service specs till they have gone through their workshop process. Instead of marketing hype, we’re hitting for a reality homerun and I think the web service standardization track record will speaking for itself with time as the various specs come through the pipeline.

 

WS-Security has already successfully gone thru the process, in that case with Oasis, and now WS-Addressing has made it to a path with W3C. As for the other specs, well when they’ve ‘matured’ and we have the industry consensus which all customers need – then you’ll hear more news; as opposed to what potentially could exist in a new standard done under the more ‘traditional’ way of developing standards thru committee.

 

In coming postings I’ll be taking a closer look at how current standards bodies actually do their work, and I’ll try to suggest that there just might be a better way to develop real open standards for everyone.