The original goal of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. That meant removing or lessening the runtime dependencies between components or endpoints. One of the best, if overused, examples of loosely coupled systems is the way the Web works today. Routing, DNS, cookies, SSL handshakes, authentication, redirection, etc. are all handled by the infrastructure at runtime. Only a URL is typically required. In order to achieve this in the SOA world, contracts, requirement and capabilities need to be defined and automated through a declarative and manageable mechanism. WSDL is far from being adequate as a complete contract language for SOA. The required level of abstraction for SOA sits at the Policy level. Policies contain assertions about the operational interfaces for components in an SOA. These include credential preferences, authentication and authorization mechanisms, signature and encryption preferences, identity sources, routing, transformations, versioning, reliable messaging and others. This talk will introduce the concept of Policy Driven SOA and discuss Policy and the WS-Policy specification as the new contract abstraction for SOA.

Speaker Bio: Toufic Boubez is the co-founder and CTO of Layer 7 Technologies. Prior to co-founding Layer 7 Technologies, Toufic was the Chief Web Services Architect for IBM's Software Group and drove their early XML and Web services strategies. Toufic co-authored the original UDDI API specification. He’s the co-editor of the W3C WS-Policy specification, and is a co-author of the WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation and WS-Federation specifications. Toufic is a sought-after presenter and has chaired XML and Web services conferences. In 2002, InfoWorld named Toufic to its “Ones to Watch” list. An author of many publications, one of his most recent books is "Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI".