The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday issued what it described as a critical Web standard for extending Web services features and SOA applications. The Web Services Policy (WS-Policy) 1.5 standard enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing of metadata and other scenarios in a modular fashion, W3C said. SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disrupting or requiring changes to lower-level service descriptions. Extensions are defined by other specifications. Now an official W3C Recommendation, or standard, WS-Policy 1.5 connects core Web services standards – SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0 and XML Schema – to a set of extensions. The Web Services Policy Working Group, which oversees WS-Policy 1.5, features companies such as Adobe Systems, BEA systems, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.The WS-Policy 1.5 – Framework document can be accessed here. Software Development