What is Web Services (WS) Policy?
To consume non trivial web services you must fully understand its XML contract (WSDL) along with any other additional requirements, capabilities, or preferences that translate to the configuration of the service and essentially becomes the policies of the service. WS Policy framework provides a way to express the policies of a service in a machine-readable way. A Web services infrastructure can be enhanced to understand and enforce policies at runtime. For instance, a service author might write a policy requiring a digital signature and encryption, while service consumers can use the policy information to reason out whether they can adhere to this policy information to use the service. Furthermore, Web service infrastructure can be enhanced to enforce those requirements without requiring the service author to write even a single line of code.
