Hewlett-Packard says Web services took a giant step forward earlier this month with the approval of Web Services Distributed Management 1.0, which allows services with little knowledge of each other to interoperate and understand how each needs to run.
WSDM fills a hole that existing standards for creating Web services, such as XML or Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (for building registries of Web services), did not cover, says Judi Cowell, director of research and development for HP's Standards Program Office.
WSDM allows management information to be communicated across the many software elements that make up an operational Web service. Web services by design are loosely coupled, or lacking in specific information about each other. Without WSDM, there was an invisible barrier between Web services: They didn't have the means to talk about management issues.
The Oasis standards body approved the 1.0 version of the WSDM specification on March 9. Before that approval, HP produced reference implementations of the three parts of the WSDM specs and donated them as open-source code to the Apache Foundation.
