The more I look at SOAP and REST, the more I started seeing references to WS-*. I wondered what the heck that meant. Nobody I know seemed to talk about that. And I spend a good deal of time with developers. The problem is that most of us are legacy developers who do not deal a lot with newer technologies on our jobs. I found that WS-* refers to a set of specifications for web services. It is not a single set of specs. And no one body owns all of them. Many of the actual specs begin with WS. So that is why they are collectively known as WS-*. And it is pronounced WS-Star.Here are some sample WS-* specifications that I have found:
WS-Notification
WS-Addressing
WS-Transfer
WS-Eventing
WS-Enumeration
WS-Policy
WS-Discovery
WS-Metadata Exchange
WS-Resource Framework
WS-Security
WS-Trust
WS-Federation
WS-Reliability
WS-Transfer
WS-AtomicTransaction
WS-Coordination
WS-CAF
WS-Transaction
WS-Context
WS-CF
WS-Management
I decided to look up one example in more detail. So I chose WS-Policy at random. The full name of the specification is Web Services Policy Framework. There are 20 authors of the spec. Many of them seemed to be affiliated with Microsoft Corporation. For example Don Box was one of the authors. The document itself is 25 pages long.
To tell the truth, I really did not understand the introduction section to the WS-Policy spec. It was filled with a bunch of buzz words. At least I got that the name space for the spec is http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy. And it helped that they gave an example of the spec in XML code.
There is a reason why the author of Ruby on Rails calls WS-Star the “WS Death Star”.
