Between the major building blocks of the Web Services infrastructure there is naturally a little mortar to hold the whole building up.  I had the opportunity to help bring two of these small pieces of mortar out into public view.  They were published yesterday on MSDN and other partner’s web sites.

WSDL 1.1 Binding Extension for SOAP 1.2

This specification describes how to indicate in a WSDL 1.1 document that a service uses SOAP 1.2.

SOAP 1.1 Binding for MTOM 1.0

This specification describes the application of the MTOM attachment mechanism, originally defined for SOAP 1.2, to SOAP 1.1 envelopes.

Basically, these two specs provide the tiny pieces of missing specese to allow technologies in the "1.1" space to work with the final W3C versions.  This helps bridge the gap between the old and the new, and facilitates implementations (like ours) which support both versions of SOAP with some degree of parity.  Tiny specs, but useful, representing a certain level of completion within the stack.

And, though I had the pleasure of co-authoring primarily with Chris Ferris of IBM, this is the first time Microsoft and Oracle have co-authored a document together.  I’ve worked for years with Oracle representatives, sometimes towards different technical agendas, and I hope this represents the beginning of better alignment between our views of Web Services standards, and leads to more direct cooperation between our companies both within and outside the standards fora.