IBM News on Ulitzer

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I; http://www.ws-i.org) today announced that Christopher Ferris will speak on its behalf at the Software Testing Analysis & Review Conference (STARWEST; http://www.sqe.com/starwest/) to be held in Anaheim, California, October 5-9.

WS-I is an open industry organization chartered to establish and document Best Practices for Web Services interoperability. Ferris, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, is CTO of Industry Standards, Software Group Standards Strategy organization.

Ferris’ presentation, “Coloring Outside the Lines: Web Services Interoperability Testing,” will illustrate how WS-I testing tools can help determine when Web services implementations exceed what the Web services community has agreed upon as the foundations for interoperability. The session, scheduled for 3 p.m. on Wednesday, October 7, will show attendees how to go beyond the test designs of conventional applications to help ensure that their Web services operate as expected.

"Web services interoperability testing is complex, subjective and unlike traditional testing in many ways, and WS-I's carefully developed materials and tools can be of significant assistance," said Ferris. "The STARWEST attendees in particular will appreciate the value of assessing specific Web services instances against the WS-I Profiles requirements to ensure that they can interoperate with other conformant services."

Involved in the architecture, design and engineering of distributed systems for most of his 25-plus-year career in IT, Ferris is also actively engaged in open standards development for XML and Web services. He currently represents IBM as an alternate on the WS-I Board of Directors. He is the former chair of the WS-I Basic Profile WG, and he served as editor for the WS-I Basic Profile 1.2 and 2.0. He co-chaired the W3C Web Services Policy WG and served as chair of the W3C XML Protocols WG. In addition to representing IBM on the OASIS WS-RX TC, Ferris is a former elected member of the OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB).

About WS-I

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is an open industry organization chartered to establish Best Practices for Web Services interoperability, for selected groups of Web Services standards, across platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

WS-I comprises a diverse community of Web Services leaders from a wide range of companies and standards development organizations (SDOs). The WS-I committees and working groups create Profiles and supporting Testing Tools based on Best Practices for selected sets of Web Services standards. The Profiles and Testing Tools are available for use by the Web Services community to aid in developing and deploying interoperable Web Services. For more information, visit http://www.ws-i.org or send email to [email protected].