The World Wide Web Consortium issued a critical Web standard for extending the features of Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Web Services Policy enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing metadata, and other scenarios, in modular fashion. With Web Services Policy 1.5, SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disruption or requiring changes to lower level service descriptions. The extensions themselves (consisting of what are called "policy assertions") are defined by other specifications.
The W3C Web Services Policy Working Group invited implementers to demonstrate interoperability by evaluating software against the group's test suite. Ten implementations of Web Services Policy 1.5 helped confirm the maturity of the specification. The tests focused on security assertions, one of the most important use cases cited by industry.
