New web standard for XML

Although IBM and Microsoft remain fierce competitors in the web-based services race, the two companies are continuing their joint work, which began last year, to further XML web services.

The two technology giants have proposed a web standard, called the WS-Inspection specification, which will define what services a business offers and how users might access those services.

The web services standards are built using XML, the web standard for information exchange that allows businesses to communicate and conduct transactions online.

Bob Sutor, IBM's director of ebusiness standards strategy, said WS-Inspection, another key specification in the web services framework, complements the IBM and Microsoft pioneered Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard.

According to Sutor, by using the new standard, businesses will be able to directly find each other's services over the web.

"WS-Inspection enables developers to present references to services that are both easy to maintain and consume," Sutor said.

The spec provides a standard way to locate and retrieve Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents and other service descriptions by browsing a single web server. It also provides a way to correlate XML web services with other types of content, such as HTML pages.

The two companies said they plan to submit the technology to an industry standards body soon. Implementations of the spec are available with the latest version of the IBM Web Services ToolKit and Microsoft Visual Studio .Net.

Web services involve reworking actions that currently take place on a desktop computer or a server, so they can occur on a group of servers and desktops that can search for each other on the web.

Microsoft's strategy is called .Net, while Sun Microsystems's is known as Sun One.