Automated recurring content flows, technical and marketing information from business partners, product manuals from your company's divisions, and publications from a wide variety of media sources feed the business requirements of Web today. Automating and managing the syndication of content feeds used to be time-consuming and expensive, but now there's a cool way to do it as a web service with ICE.

Online syndication with ICE 1.0 was considered to be a "web service" (in general terms) in that it provided the automated delivery of a content stream over the Internet. However ICE 1.0 was not "spelled like" a true web service. Because ICE 1.0 was developed in the early days of XML, it could only incorporate those W3C recommendations that existed at that time. By 2001, significant advances had been made in the XML family of standards. The XML Schema Definition Language provided a powerful alternative to XML DTDs (Document Type Definitions). XML Namespaces provided new mechanisms for modularity and extension of the specification. Specifications such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) are emerging as the foundations for the next generation of Internet applications. In addition, the ICE specification, itself, had been implemented and a great body of experience had been gained as a result of these implementations. ICE 2.0, however, has been significantly redefined using web-services standards to provide for syndication a true web service.

This presentation will focus on the re-definition of ICE 2.0 as a web service. ICE simple datatypes, ICE XML schemas, ICE use of SOAP bindings, and ICE WSDL scripts will be examined in detail.

More information maybe found on ICE at: http://www.idealliance.org/standards_ice.asp