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Standards Watch

Progress Software has taken a leadership role in driving emerging industry standards for SOA, Web services, XML, J2EE and other evolutionary technologies. Our commitment to promoting standards adoption and open source solutions facilitates the strategic development of enterprise software products and services that businesses can leverage for long-term success.

Sonic Software members hold committer status in the Apache Axis project, and are on the Apache Web Services Project Management Committee. Sonic submitted a JMS asynchronous transport mechanism for Axis 1.0, enabling developers to use Apache Axis SOAP APIs and seamlessly embed a JMS transport layer as an alternative to HTTP to support asynchronous communications.

Sonic's Glen Daniels has been a lead architect for the Apache Axis project since its inception, is currently leading the release of Axis 1.2, and participating in the architecture and development of new Axis-related initiatives such as Axis 2.0.
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Sonic Software is an active member of the Java Community Process, whose charter is to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits. As a leader in JMS industry, Sonic Software continues to work to ensure that J2EE as a viable technology for business integration. This includes participation in a number of Java Specification Request (JSR) Expert Groups (EGs).
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  • Java Message Service (JMS)
    JMS is an API developed to enable enterprise level messaging. It is a required, integral part of the J2EE specification and provides point-to-point queuing and publish-and-subscribe messaging models. SonicMQ is the first 100% pure Java JMS implementation. Sonic is an active participant in the JMS effort.

  • Java Connector Architecture (J2EE CA or JCA)
    The J2EE Connector Architecture (JSR 112) defines an architectural model to integrate heterogeneous enterprise information systems. Version 1.5 of the specification adds support for bi-directional, asynchronous interactions and additional functionality to the 1.0 release. Sonic is a member of the EG.

  • Java Management Extensions (JMX)
    The JMX specification (JSR 3) defines Java based management agents and agent services. JSR 160 defines remote client APIs for discovery of and access to JMX agents.

  • Java Business Integration (JBI)
    The JBI EG (JSR 208) is defining business integration service provider interfaces (SPIs) for J2EE. JBI SPIs will enable an integration environment in Java for choreography specifications such as BPEL4WS. JBI is building on the work being done to define standard business integration metadata for Web services in JSR 207. Sonic is a member of the EG.

  • Java APIs for XML Messaging (JAXM and SAAJ)
    The JAXM EG (JSR 67) developed two specifications: JAXM and SAAJ (SOAP with Attachments API for Java). JAXM allows applications to exchange document oriented XML messages with a JAVA API. JAXM includes the notion of profiles to support a variety of standards-based messaging protocols, e.g., SOAP or ebXML. SAAJ allows applications to exchange messages conforming to SOAP 1.1 and SwA. It was split out from the JAXM specification so that other J2EE specifications (e.g., JAX-RPC) could call it out separately from the rest of JAXM. Sonic is a member of the EG.

  • Implementing Enterprise Web Services
    This JSR (109) defined a client server programming model conforming to the JAX-RPC specification, and a runtime architecture for implementing Web services in J2EE. Sonic Software is a member of the EG.

  • Java Technology and XML
    Additional information on Java and XML Technology standards, including Java Message Service (JMS), Java Connector Architecture (J2EE CA or JCA), Java API for XML Processing (JAXP), Java API for XML Registries (JAXR), Java API for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC), and SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ).



Sonic Software is a sponsor member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). OASIS creates interoperability standards and industry specifications based on public standards such as XML. Sonic is an active participant in several of the OASIS technical committees.
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  • WS-Notification
    WS-Notification is a Technical Committee (TC) developing a specification for interoperable publish-and-subscribe messaging using Web services interfaces. WS-Notification is key to helping to enable interoperability between Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) vendors, and is a key part of standardizing grid services such as those being developed by the Globus Alliance.

  • WS-ResourceFramework
    WS-ResourceFramework is a Technical Committee (TC) developing a specification for defining a generic and open framework for modeling and accessing stateful resources using Web services. This includes mechanisms to describe views on the state, to support management of the state through properties associated with the Web service, and to describe how these mechanisms are extensible to groups of Web services. WS-RF is a key part of standardizing grid services such as those being developed by the Globus Alliance.

  • Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM)
    The WS-RM Technical Committee is developing a reliable message delivery model specification for Web services. The specification defines Quality of Service features such as message persistence, message acknowledgement and resend, duplicate message elimination, ordered message delivery, and delivery status awareness. Sonic co-authored the initial specification and sponsored WS-RM's formation.

  • Web Services Business Process Execution (BPEL)
    The BPEL Technical Committee is developing a specification based on the BPEL4WS document published in August 2002 by several software vendors. The BPEL TC specification will identify common concepts for a business process execution language, forming a foundation for usage patterns including process interface descriptions required for business protocols and executable process models. Sonic is a member of the BPEL TC.

  • Web Services Security (WSS)
    The WSS Technical Committee was chartered to expand security provisions described in the WS-Security specification. The WSS intends to define a foundation for higher-level security services that will be defined in other specifications. In addition to the core specification, WSS intends to provide profiles for SAML, XrML, Kerberos and X.509. Sonic Software is a member of the WSS.

  • ebXML
    ebXML is a set of standards defining an end-to-end framework for B2B. There are four OASIS ebXML Technical Committees and one Joint Committee that coordinates activities across ebXML Technical Committees. In addition, UN/CEFACT sponsors the development of ebXML Business Process and Core Components. Links to the UN/CEFACT ebXML efforts can be found on the ebXML home page.



    Sonic Software has participated in and passed an interoperability testing effort sponsored by the Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC) and Drummond Group, Inc. (DGI), in a test effort which involved 11 vendors and 14 software products.
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    Sonic Software has also participated and passed The ETSI Plugtests™ , an interoperability test event for electronic business using XML (the ebXML standard).
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Sonic Software is an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is an international organization developing interoperable technologies, including specifications, guidelines, software, and tools for the Web. The W3C drives and controls standards such as: HTML, XML, XSL, XSLT, SOAP, XQuery, DOM, and XML Signature.
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The W3C organized the Web Services Activity in early 2002 to design a coordinated set of technology standards for Web services. The Web Services Activity currently includes the following Working Groups:

  • SOAP 1.2 - XML Protocol Working Group (XMLP)
    Sonic Software participates in XMLP, which is developing the next release of the SOAP specification. SOAP 1.2 includes Part 0: Primer, Part1: Messaging Framework, Part 2: Adjuncts and an Attachment Feature.

  • Web Services Description Working Group
    The Web Services Description Working Group is designing WSDL 2.0, a language to describe interfaces to Web services. WSDL 2.0 includes definition capabilities for messages, message exchange patterns, and protocol bindings.

Industry Collaborations

Many of the Web Services specifications originate from standards organizations such as the W3C and OASIS, and some also exist as a result of a collaboration of vendors that include organizations such as BEA, Computer Associates, Global Grid Forum, IBM, Microsoft, RSA, SAP, Sonic Software and TIBCO.

The goal of these vendor collaborations is to eventually bring the specifications before a standards body, after a considerable amount of public feedback sessions and interoperability workshops have occurred. For some specifications, such as WS-Security, WS-BPEL, WS-Notification and the WS-ResourceFramework family of specifications, this has already happened.

Sonic Software is committed to being actively involved in the development of these specifications through joint authorship and through workshop participation to ensure ongoing interoperability.

  • WS-Policy (pdf)
    The Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) provides a general purpose model and corresponding syntax to describe the capabilities, requirements, and characteristics of a Web Service. WS-Policy defines a base set of constructs that can be used and extended by other Web services specifications to describe a broad range of service requirements and capabilities. Some policy assertions specify traditional requirements and capabilities that will ultimately manifest on the wire (e.g., authentication scheme, transport protocol selection). Other policy assertions have no wire manifestation yet are critical to proper service selection and usage (e.g., privacy policy, QoS characteristics). WS-Policy provides a single policy grammar to allow both kinds of assertions to be reasoned about in a consistent manner.

    Sonic Software is a co-author of the WS-Policy specification along with BEA, IBM, Microsoft and SAP AG.

  • WS-PolicyAttachments (pdf)
    Web Services Policy Attachment (WS-PolicyAttachment) defines two general-purpose mechanisms for associating policies with the subjects to which they apply. This specification also defines how these general-purpose mechanisms may be used to associate WS-Policy with WSDL and UDDI descriptions.

    Sonic Software is a co-author of the WS-PolicyAttachments specification along with BEA, IBM, Microsoft and SAP AG.

  • WS-Transfer (pdf)
    This specification describes a general SOAP-based protocol for accessing XML representations of Web service-based resources, such as properties. WS-Transfer defines operations that allow Web services to expose XML representations of themselves and to allow clients to interact with these Web services by transferring XML representations as part of a SOAP request between the service and the consumer.

    Sonic Software is a co-author of WS-Transfer along with Computer Associates, BEA, Microsoft and Systinet.

  • WS-Enumeration (pdf)
    The WS-Enumeration specification describes a SOAP-based protocol for requesting, sending, and receiving lists of individual XML elements. This is useful for reading database tables, event logs, message queues, or other linear information models where a single-request/single-reply messaging pattern is insufficient for transferring large data sets over SOAP.

    Sonic Software is a co-author of WS-Enumeration along with Computer Associates, BEA, Microsoft and Systinet.

WS-I is an open industry organization created to facilitate Web services interoperability. WS-I develops: Web services test tools and implementation guidelines, profiles to help with adoption and support for key Web services standards, usage scenarios, use cases, sample applications and a roadmap for long-term direction. Sonic Software is an active participant in several of the WS-I work groups.
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