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WS-Addressing Working Group Closes

by Mark Little on Sep 06, 2007 |

The W3C have just announced that the WS-Addressing Working Group has closed. As the announcement states:

This message is to inform you that the Web Services Addressing Working Group
is now closed. Many thanks to Robert Freund (Hitachi, Ltd., Chair), Mark
Nottingham (previously BEA Systems) and the Working Group participants for all
of their contributions in this area.

There is no plan to produce a new version for Web Services Addressing at this
time. The current plan is for a Web Services Core Working Group to maintain these specifications. We are also
working separately on evaluating additional work to specify a mechanism for
associating WS-Policy with an Endpoint Reference.

WS-Addressing first came to visibility in 2004, with many of the current plethora of WS-* specifications using it back then, such as WS-Transactions and WS-Security. There have been a few criticisms leveled at WS-Addressing over the years, such as the way in which it is possible to define sessions with it (related to that would be the overlap with WS-Context), or that it's not tied closely enough to the SOAP specification. Like most of the WS-* specifications, there was a competitor on the horizon, even if only briefly: WS-Message Delivery from Oracle et al. Whether or not the intention of that specification was simply to force the WS-Addressing author companies at the time to go to a standards body, several months later it duly arrived at W3C.

There have been a few changes since it went to W3C, such as the removal of ReferenceProperties and a reference to WS-Context. However, even the W3C Technical Architecture Group asked for clarification on the Web-ness of EndPoint References. But in general most people agreed that WS-Addressing was an important missing piece from the WS-* architecture if we were to achieve interoperability. Those that disagreed still probably classed it as Mostly Harmless.