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WS-Policy September 2004

Stefan Tilkov,

The WS-Policy standard has been updated. To quote the document itself:

Applied in the Web services model, policy is used to convey conditions on an interaction between two Web service endpoints. Satisfying assertions in the policy usually results in behavior that reflects these conditions. Typically, the provider of a Web service exposes a policy to convey conditions under which it provides the service. A requester might use this policy to decide whether or not to use the service. A requester may choose any alternative since each is a valid configuration for interaction with the service, but a requester must choose only a single alternative since each is an alternative configuration.

A quick attempt at comparing the new version (which doesn’t seem to have a version number, BTW), shows that this is not exactly easy to do. There’s still a PDF (from May 2003) at the coverpages.org site, but manually trying to find out what has changed is way too much to do without having a serious reason.

The MSDN announcement has this to offer:

Adding two new co-authors and reflecting feedback from recent workshops, these updated versions refine the semantics for how to compare two policies to determine a base level of compatibility and expands on how policy is associated with Web services.

Am I missing something? Is publishing a new version of a document with change bars somehow uncool?