The Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) Forum has formed a new working group to investigate opportunities for supporting Web Services standards in its specifications.
The Forum says the new group will determine the feasibility of supporting Web Services in its current specifications, now in version 1.4. It will focus on those standards and specifications now approved or in their final stages by other standards bodies, including SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, WS-Security, BPEL4WS, ebXML and SAML.
Mark Tiggas of Wells Fargo and IFX Forum chair, says: "IFX Forum has a chance to provide leadership to the industry as it begins to use Web Services, as well as offer real-world business feedback to the technology standards bodies writing the Web Services specifications."
Josh Lee of Microsoft and chair of the Web Services working group, says the group will show how IFX's schemas and messages fit into the Web services infrastructure. "Without this work, we risk the development of Web Services implementations that are inconsistent or incompatible with other implementations," he says.
The group expects to complete its first reviews of the IFX Forum specifications and Web Services in April 2003, and offer its architectural recommendations, implementation guides, samples and user cases by August 2003.