WSO2 today hosts the WS-Metadata Exchange Interop Workshop here in Auburn, California.  Representatives from Microsoft, IBM, WSO2, Sun, Oracle, and Adobe are currently present, and already showing some initial progress at running the interop scenarios.

WS-Metadata Exchange is a fairly simple spec, allowing one to approach another service and query it about it’s capabilities (WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Policy).  Having a common way to do some initial handshake allows services to bootstrap communication with each other.  I think the most likely scenario for this is doing some alignment of security policies so that subsequent communications can be done in a secure fashion.

Update: As of Thursday, we had overall excellent interop results with most of the matrix filled in green.  Still a few reds in the matrix between a few vendors that will hopefully get filled in next week.  Overall, I think the meeting went very well and I think everyone enjoyed coming to the "WSO2 Auburn campus."  Hopefully we can make this a regular occurrence!