- Web services policy spec advances
- Spring in the air for Web services
- WSDL 2.0 approved
- Enterprise 2.0: Think 'collaboration'
- Sun's Bray backs REST
- OASIS considers identity management
- Web services transaction spec approved
- WS-I eyes secure Web services
- W3C boosts Web access for disabled
- MS vows on Web services
September 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Web services policy spec advances
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday issued what it described as a critical Web standard for extending Web services features and SOA applications.
The Web Services Policy (WS-Policy) 1.5 standard enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing of metadata and other scenarios in a modular fashion, W3C said. SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disrupting or requiring changes to lower-level service descriptions. Extensions are defined by other specifications.
Now an official W3C Recommendation, or standard, WS-Policy 1.5 connects core Web services standards - SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0 and XML Schema - to a set of extensions.
The Web Services Policy Working Group, which oversees WS-Policy 1.5, features companies such as Adobe Systems, BEA systems, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.
The WS-Policy 1.5 - Framework document can be accessed here.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 4, 2007 08:57 AM
August 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Spring in the air for Web services
Interface21, makers of the popular Spring development technologies for Java, are announcing on Tuesday Spring Web Services 1.0.
In development for two years, Spring Web Services 1.0 is an open source technology that provides Web services-based data integration capabilities and will work with Java and other languages.
Features of Spring Web Services 1.0 include enforcement of best practices such as the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) Basic Profile, contract-first development and having a loose coupling between contract and implementation.
Also included is the ability to distribute XML requests to any object depending on message payload, SOAP action header or XPath expression. Incoming XML messages can be handled in standard JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) APIs such as DOM (Document Object Model), JDOM, StAX (Streaming API for XML) or dom4j.
The Object/XML Mapping module in Spring Web Services supports JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) 1 and 2 as well as Castor, XMLBeans, the JiBX framework and XStream.
Posted by Paul Krill on August 21, 2007 05:00 AM
June 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is announcing Wednesday that it has completed work on the WSDL 2.0 Web services standard, which expands HTTP and SOAP support for Web applications.
Thusly, WSDL (Web Services Description Language) 2.0 is now an official W3C Recommendation, which is the equivalent of a W3C standard.
WSDL 2.0 incorporates improvements for WSDL 1.1 found in the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) Basic Profile and builds in inheritance, import functions and improved description of faults and errors, W3C said.
"It's been a long time in development, but developers can see it's been worth the wait," said Jonathan Marsh, co-chair of the W3C Web Services Description Working Group and director of Mashup Technologies at WSO2, in a statement released by W3C.
"In addition to the rigorous interoperability testing, we're pleased to have given developers the HTTP binding, which provides simple Web-friendly access to a service when the advanced features available in the SOAP stack, such as WS-Addressing, WS-Security, and WS-ReliableMessaging aren't required," Marsh said.
With the complete HTTP binding, WSDL 2.0 will work with REST (Representational State Transfer) applications without any technical obstacle, according to W3C.
WSDL 2.0 shores up some weaknesses but issues remain for SOA deployments, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink.
"WSDL 2.0 is an important revision in the most central Web services standard and will ease many of the problems facing Web services developers," Bloomberg said in an email. "It cleans up many details like fault-handling, semantics and terminology and it does add better REST support, which is useful for Web service developers who wish to work with HTTP and who don't need the more advanced capabilities SOAP brings to the table."
WSDL 2.0 presents challenges for SOA implementations because "it still lacks robust requirements for service consumers as well as nonfunctional requirements for Web services such as quality of service," Bloomberg said.
"As a result, service contracts must expand beyond the limitations of WSDL 2.0 to include all the requirements necessary to provide loose coupling between Service providers and consumers over time," he said.
WSDL 2.0 support is built into emerging Web services standards including Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) and WS-Policy 1.5, both of which are anticipated to be completed by W3C in September.
Among the companies planning to support WSDL 2.0 in upcoming product releases include Adobe Systems, IBM, Sun Microsystems and WSO2, W3C said.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 27, 2007 06:51 AM
June 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Enterprise 2.0: Think 'collaboration'
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is underway here in Boston, and companies big and small are already jockeying for mindshare in the nebulous Enterprise 2.0 space. What is Enterprise 2.0 you ask? According to conference organizers CMP, the term describes "technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email."
OK, so enterprise 2.0 is about ditching e-mail...? Cool! where do I sign up??!
But wait...there's more. "Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility."
Ok. So that's general enough that it could apply to pretty much any computing technology in the last 30 years. Where's the beef?
Judging from some of the announcements that have come out of Enterprise 2.0 so far, the rubber of "Web 2.0" is meeting the road of enterprise IT in areas like enterprise search and Web-based collaboration.
As our own Ephraim Schwartz noted earlier, IBM used Enterprise 2.0 to unveil new collaboration and social networking tools and enhancements to existing products like Lotus Notes.
Using the banner "Web 2.0 Goes to Work," IBM released three applications: IBM Quickr 8.0, IBM Lotus Connections, and IBM Info 2.0.
Quickr is team collaboration software, and Connections is a social-networking application in the vein of MySpace and FaceBook, but with an enterprise focus. The apps have a lot in common in terms of the technologies underneath. Info 2.0 is a mashup platform for the enterprise.
Companies buffeted by the hype around Web 2.0, a term originally coined by Tim O'Reilly aren't faring much better with "Enterprise 2.0," according Anant Jhingran, IBM's CTO of Information Management.
IBM's goal, said Jhingran, is to enable grassroots innovation around existing enterprise IT platforms so that they can "embrace and extend" those platforms, in a process he refers to as "open innovation."
Collaboration is also the idea behind Zoho's announcement of Zoho Meeting, a platform for doing free online meetings and shared desktops.
"In addition to conducting live meetings with friends or colleagues, Zoho Meeting users can demonstrate products to prospective customers or troubleshoot client issues online. And once concluded, a Zoho Meeting presentation can be embedded as a Flash object in a blog, wiki, notebook, or any Web page," Zoho said.
Microsoft is also jumping on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon. Company GM of SharePoint Platform and Tools presented at the conference on Monday and unveiled a host of Enterprise 2.0-y updates, including an early release of SharePoint Community Kit Version 2.0, which includes better blogging, wiki, and AJAX development features (details here.) Microsoft also unveiled an internal effort to build and adopt more social computing tools, including a wiki-style resource for information on the SharePoint platform. Finally, the company announced a beta release of NewsGator Social Sites, an add on to NewsGator Enterprise Server that improves SharePoint Server 2007's social networking features.
SpikeSource hit many of the same notes on Monday when they announced a SaaS (software as a service) version of SuiteTwo, a Web 2.0 appliance that rolls up blogging, wiki, RSS syndication and other hot Web 2.0 collaboration technologies from Six Apart, SocialText, SimpleFeed, NewsGator and Visible Path. The hosted version of SuiteTwo allows companies to do "Enterprise 2.0" without worrying about deploying, then managing new hardware and software, SpikeSource said.
However, the addition of so many new collaboration platforms has really upped the ante for robust enterprise search that can integrate structured and unstructured enterprise data -- including information hidden in files on employees' hard drives and e-mail inboxes, IBM's Jhingran said. Companies like Altus Learning Systems are at Enterprise 2.0 trying to tap into that demand. The company on Wednesday announced version 5.0 of its Xtreme Knowledge Sharing software (XKS 5.0).
XKS 5.0 is an enterprise knowledge sharing technology that allows companies to access and share information in blogs, wikis and even video files.
Posted by Paul Roberts on June 19, 2007 01:11 PM
May 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and a co-inventor of XML, is advocating REST (Representational State Transfer) as a way to bolster integration between different computing platforms.
In an interview at the RailsConf 2007 event in Portland, where REST has been a prominent subject, Bray said the Ruby on Rails community and others as well need to focus on integration. Rails is hot stuff, he said. But Java is not going away nor are platforms such as .Net and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor).
"What we need to be able to build is apps that run across all these [systems] and that remains a problem that is substantially unsolved," said Bray, who plans to make these same points in a keynote presentation on Saturday.
The WS-* (pronounced ws star) stack has failed to solve the problem of interoperability, said Bray. REST presents a better approach, Bray said. He is not alone in supporting REST. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, also believes in the technology. Incidentally, Hansson pans WS-*, too.
"I think there's not enough emphasis across the whole spectrum of IT in integrating with other systems," Bray said.
"We're starting to see an emerging consensus that the best bet for that kind of stuff is based on REST architecture and Web-style computing," Bray said. REST has provided the basis for the World Wide Web, he said. But tools are needed for REST, he said.
Bray, however, did give a nod to Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology for forging interoperability with Windows systems. WCF features a subset of WS-* technology, Bray said.
"Talking to WCF is hard. It's cost us a huge investment to make the Java stack talk to it," said Bray. He envisions a link between WCF and REST, also.
In the Ruby and Ruby on Rails spaces, Bray noted Sun efforts such as employing the lead developers of JRuby, which is an implementation of Ruby for the Java Virtual Machine. Ruby and Ruby on Rails support also is being built into the NetBeans open source tooling platform that Sun shepherds.
An optimized version of Ruby for the Solaris OS also is planned, Bray said.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 18, 2007 04:13 PM
May 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
OASIS considers identity management
OASIS has formed a committee to advance the WS-Federation specification for identity management in Web services, meaning the technology now goes through the process of becoming an OASIS standard.
WS-Federation seeks to extend identity management by enabling federations of trust. It is part of the OASIS effort to provide for standard security mechanisms in Web services. Version 1.1 of the specification will be contributed to the new WS-Federation Technical Committee, OASIS said this week.
"WS-Federation is a method for expressing and managing trust relationships among parties sharing identity data," said James Bryce Clark, director of standards development for OASIS, in a statement released by OASIS. "This specification was intended for programs that use the WS-Trust OASIS Standard for security token exchange, the WS-Policy family of methods for describing constraints and rules, and the WS-Security OASIS Standard for associating security content with SOAP messages."
"This set of specifications is designed to compose, together with other related standards (including WS-Reliable Messaging and the WS-Transaction OASIS Standard), as a seamless and exclusive stack of specifications for secure and reliable Web services," Bryce said.
Organizations and business partners will be able to collaborate more safely and smoothly with WS-Federation, said Paul Cotton of Microsoft, who is convening the technical committee, in the OASIS statement.
WS-Federation was developed by BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, IBM, Layer 7, Microsoft, Novell, and VeriSign
Posted by Paul Krill on May 3, 2007 10:54 AM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Web services transaction spec approved
OASIS has approved as an official standard WS-Context 1.0, bolstering Web services in transactional environments.
Specifically, WS-Context defines a framework supporting coordinated and transactional compositions for multiple Web services applications, OASIS said on Wednesday. WS-Context ensures that multiple Web services deployed in a variety of execution environments behave as if they are being deployed in a single, consistent environment, according to OASIS.
"For example, an organization's SOA may require security information, conversational session information, database and file handles and process IDs, among other services, to be shared across multiple execution environments built on different platforms. WS-Context ensures that the Java, .Net, and other Web services in the enterprise all behave similarly and as expected at runtime," said Martin Chapman, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework Technical Committee and an Oracle official, in a statement released by OASIS.
"When Web services are used in combination, the ability to set the boundaries of an activity (such as start/end or success/failure) and to inform participants of changes to activities become extremely important," explained Eric Newcomer of Iona Technologies, also a co-chair of the committee, in the statement.
"WS-Context provides standard, interoperable ways to demarcate and coordinate Web services activities. Business process transactions can be recovered predictably and consistently with WS-Context, and the standard allows participants to define their relationships with one another," Newcomer said.
Other companies besides Iona and Oracle that participated in development of WS-Context include Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.
Posted by Paul Krill on April 25, 2007 03:19 PM
March 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) plans to hold a news briefing Tuesday on secure, interoperable Web services.
Presenters will offer up news on WS-I Profiles and insight into upcoming developments, according to a bulletin from the organization. The bulletin states that secure Web services are a "critical requirement" for many enterprises, but it has been impossible until now to have Web services that are both interoperable and secure.
With multiple standards and a list of Web services security methods available, it is becoming more difficult to ensure that service-to-service interactions are interoperable and protected from the "unscrupulous."
Because of this situation, WS-I continues to make security a top priority in interoperability efforts, WS-I said in its bulletin.
Michael Bechauf, president and chair of WS-I, and Paul Cotton, chair of the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group, will discuss mechanics of secure interoperable Web services during the presentation.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 30, 2007 07:46 AM
September 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
W3C boosts Web access for disabled
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday published documents providing developers with assistance on making dynamic Web content usable to persons with disabilites, as part of the organization's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Documents published include the first working public drafts of the Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) suite, including the WAI-ARIA Roadmap, WAI-ARIA Roles and WAI-ARIA States and Properties.
"As people are demanding more from the Web - more information, more responsive applications and richer experiences - an explosion in technologies that exclude access to many people is growing. This new suite of documents being rolled out is significant because they will help developers gain access to the tools needed to support persons with disabilities on the Web," said Rich Schwerdtfeger, IBM Distinguished Engineer and author of the WAI- ARIA Roadmap, in a prepared statement released by W3C. "ARIA is our first step to bring the richer, dynamic Web content experience to all users of the Web, by providing technology enhancements and examples for better, more accessible implementations."
The roadmap document describes an approach for ensuring interoperability between rich Internet applications and assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. The approach relies on technologies developed or under development by W3C, such as the XHTML Role Attribute Module. Also, the roadmap presents a gap analysis identifying technologies that may still be needed to ensure accessible rich Internet applications. Companion documents explain how to bridge those gaps.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 26, 2006 05:33 PM
September 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Anybody who wants to use the WS-* specifications for Web services standardization won't be sued by Microsoft.
The company this week posted a bulletin stating it would not assert claims for usage of 35 specifications listed in the document. Microsoft has been a co-developer of these technologies and seeks to spread their usage by making what it calls its "Microsoft Open Specification Promise," which now takes the acronym, OSP.
"It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever," the company said.
"Because Web services are a being widely adopted across the industry and with our customers, we decided to remove any potential questions about the widespread use of our IP in the implementation of these specifications," Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft, said in a statement released by the company.
"This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to you, and you acknowledge as a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise," the bulletin states. All bets are off, however, for anyone who participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft over any of the specifications.
Among the specifications covered include WSDL, SOAP, WS-Enumeration, WS-Federation and several specifications related to WS-Security. Reaction to Microsoft's move, posted with the bulletin, was favorable from open source advocates.
"I see Microsoft's introduction of the OSP as a good step by Microsoft to further enable collaboration between software vendors and the open source community. This OSP enables the open source community to implement these standard specifications without having to pay any royalties to Microsoft or sign a license agreement. I'm pleased that this OSP is compatible with free and open source licenses," said Lawrence Rosen, of the technology law firm of Rosenlaw & Einschlag.
Red Hat also endorsed the move.
"Red Hat believes that the text of the OSP gives sufficient flexibility to implement the listed specifications in software licensed under free and open source licenses. We commend Microsoft's efforts to reach out to representatives from the open source community and solicit their feedback on this text, and Microsoft's willingness to make modifications in response to our comments," said Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel at Red Hat.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 13, 2006 09:52 AM
September 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
OASIS this week announced approval of the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) version 1.1 specification as an OASIS Standard.
Proponents are billing the ratification as a boon to SOA.
The status bestowed by OASIS signifies the organization's highest level of ratification. WSDM enables management applications to be built using Web services and allows resources to be controlled by many managers through a single interface, OASIS said. Version 1.1 integrates standard versions of dependent specifications WS-Addressing, WS-Resource Framework and WS-Notification.
WSDM itself consists of two specifications: Management Using Web Services (MUWS), which defines how to represent and access manageability interfaces of resources as Web services, and Management of Web Services (MOWS), which defines how to manage Web services as resources and how to describe and access that manageability via MUWS.
Companies including as BMC Software, CA, Hitachi, SOA Software and Tibco are endorsing WSDM 1.1.
"The release of WSDM 1.1 is a significant step towards the convergence of application and system management, providing a complete standards-based platform that meets the functional requirements for SOA," said Matt Quinn, vice president of product management and strategy at Tibco, in a prepared statement released by OASIS.
"The management of IT infrastructure is fast evolving to SOA as a means to integrate data from disparate resources as well as tools from a variety of vendors. BMC believes WSDM and related Web services standards will help foster this evolution," said Vince Kowalski, chief Web services architect, BMC Software, also in a prepared statement from OASIS.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 8, 2006 07:22 AM
August 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Windows Live QnA: Answer this...
Microsoft made its Windows Live QnA service (a la Answers.com) available today. So what better question to ask than: What is Windows Live? There are four days left to come up with the answer.
Our own Oliver Rist dissected the Live juggernaut recently in his Enterprise Windows column, What the heck is Windows Live, anyway?.
...If you're thinking it's just meek retaliation to the Web service juggernaut that Google is becoming, you're only partially right. Sure, Google's announcements -- and even more recently, news from Yahoo and others -- are spurring Windows Live announcements to keep Microsoft's cutting-edge Internet relevance alive. But the product responses themselves are neither brand-new nor meek. Redmond's been planning this for some time...[Rist's Live in a nutshell:] Live Search is an updated version of MSN Search; Live Toolbar, yet another Web browser toolbar; Live.com is Microsoft's customizable portal page; Shopping and Product Search, its answers to Amazon and Froogle, respectively; Live Local, the reply to Google Maps and Mapquest; QnA, the answer to Yahoo Groups; Live Mail Desktop, the counter-punch to Google Mail, although with some very sexy mail client features culled from Outlook Web Access; and Live Expo is a burgeoning Microsoft iteration of eBay or Craigslist.
Live Academic is a search engine devoted solely to academic content -- research journals and such -- for which I don't know a direct competitor off the top of my head. Windows Live Search Mobile is supposed to deliver all the power of the updated Live Search engine in a format suitable for Windows Mobile 5 pocket devices.
OK, so it is Microsoft playing catch-up on Webifying everything. Too bad Google gets all the glory in this PR-centric world. The ex-MS PR hack Robert Scoble makes some points in A Google Vs. Microsoft Double Standard?, noting Google's edge with Web-centric bloggers following its media home run with news of its short-on-beef Office rival package yesterday.
This one sort of says it for those who use Hotmail and will be switched over the white-page world of Live at some stage soon...
6) Branding. Microsoft doesn't have a cool Web brand right now. In fact, the one that they had, MSN, is being thrown in the trash and they are switching over to Windows Live. That probably will turn out to be the right decision in the long term, but in the short term Google has the better naming team - by far. Calling Google Maps "Google Maps?" Sheer brilliance! Who came up with the name "Windows Live Local?" Blllleeeeccchhh.
And there have been some questions about if Live is the real deal, or if it is pure marketing by MS. Earlier this month, a early-departing Live manager, Niall Kennedy, raised concerns about Microsoft commitment to the strategy, saying Live was paralyzed and that the former Technorati man was not given the resources needed to roll out the program he managed for Microsoft.
Rist writes: So where's the beef for corporate America? Fortunately, it's mostly in the nonbeta offerings. Microsoft Safety Center is first: a stable and surprisingly thorough malware checker and PC Health diagnostics check, free for the asking. It won't replace corporate anti-virus, anti-spam, or even disk defragger applications, but it's a great place to start a workstation diagnostic process.
He sums up: Microsoft has made grand announcements on the future of the platform, including hints of a Web version of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft applications, but all of that is many moons away and certainly subject to change should market interest shift away from running everything through a browser. The here and now -- for businesses, anyway -- is a nice set of security and diagnostic tools and a very competitive Web and e-mail hosting service.
Tell that to the newest PR tools on the block, Gmail-packin' bloggers.
Posted by Mike Barton on August 29, 2006 01:57 PM
August 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week published new editions of four core XML data exchange specifications, featuring corrections for known errata and clarifications where potential misunderstanding could have occurred, W3C said.
Stability provided by these XML specifications underlies a steady increased in W3C technologies for querying, transforming, naming, encrypting and optimizing XML, according to W3C. Changes to the specifications were described as minor by W3C representative Ian Jacobs.
"These are solid specs," he said.
Specifications include the fourth edition of XML 1.0 and the second editions of XML 1.1, Namespaces in XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML 1.1. XML 1.0 is the main XML specification while XML 1.1 adds support for internationalization. Namespaces technology features a mechanism for mixng XML dialects.
W3C has a number of ongoing developments afoot in XML.
By the end of the year, W3C expects to publish W3C Recommendations for XML Query 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). W3C also is revising XML Schema, which is used in SOAP-based Web services, and planning additions to XML Query that extend beyond version 1.0.
The XML Processing Model Working Group soon will publish a first draft of the XML language for specifying sequences of operations on XML documents, such as transformation, validation, inclusion and decryption based on current XML pipeline products and free and open source designs.
Also, XML-specific technologies for improving the efficiency of storage, transmission and processing in XML have been developed. A W3C Working Group on Efficient XML Interchange has been chartered to expand XML into further domains requiring greater performance and additional capabilities such as streaming.
Posted by Paul Krill on August 17, 2006 09:36 AM
May 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Liberty eyes consumers with Web services project
The Liberty Alliance plans to give its Web services framework a consumer-oriented bent, enabling federated social networking.
A version of the new framework is set to be released for public review within a couple of weeks. It will be followed by a review period before a final version is set this fall.
With the upgraded framework, users will be able to share items such as music lists, photos and calendars, with privacy and security issues addressed by the framework, said Brett McDowell director of the Liberty Alliance. "We're solving the identity theft problem with this from an online perspective," McDowell said.
There will be no way, for example, for phishing of identities.
The Liberty Alliance focuses on developing a standard for federated network identity supporting current and emerging network devices. The alliance this week announced the launch of its Global Web Services Deployment Program, featuring a kick-off event in San Francisco on June 12.
The program features workshops focused on identity-enabled Web services. Liberty believes that federation is needed for identity-enabled Web services to advance.
The June 12 event will feature alliance members from Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Neustar.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 24, 2006 02:42 PM
May 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Java EE 5 (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5), the new version of the platform, supports an alternative Web services technology.
Programming in the REST (Representational State Transfer) style is enabled in Java EE 5, said Joe Keller, Sun vice president of marketing for SOA & Integration Platforms. "The improvement in the Java APIs for Web services included the ability to call in and out of Java using REST," Keller said.
Sometimes seen as an alternative to the more common SOAP and WSDL Web services, REST offers a simpler, albeit not as heavy-duty, method for ad hoc Web services, according to Sun officials at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.
"It simplifies the way in which a developer has to work with calls back and forth between remote systems," said Dan Roberts, Sun director of developer tools marketing.
While SOAP and WSDL can equip a Web service with functionality such as management and security, REST enables a quicker path. "In some cases, you just want to get something [done] very quickly and that's what REST provides," Roberts said.
Also at JavaOne, Keller noted work is under way on a real-time Java application server project, in which the application server would respond to real-time events such as stock feeds and weather information.
In another discussion at the conference, Jean Elliott, director of Java product marketing for the Java Standard Edition Platform, said Sun hears from what appears to be a minority of people in favor of open sourcing of Java.
"However, we hear from an equally vocal majority that say quality, stability and compatability matter," she said.
Sun is forging ahead with plans to offer Java through an open source format. The company has not committed to a timetable for doing so, Elliott noted.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 18, 2006 04:34 PM
March 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Giants to simplify Web services
Acknowledging that complexity has stifled Web services standardization, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Microsoft are launching an effort to converge overlapping standards and make things easier, an HP representative said on Friday.
The companies have published a white paper about the endeavor entitled, "Toward converging Web services standards for resources, events and management."
"HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft plan to develop a common set of specifications for resources, events, and management that can be broadly supported across multiple platforms," according to the white paper. "The parties will do this by building on existing specifications and defining a set of enhancements that enable this convergence. In many scenarios, vendors and customers building solutions using Web services will find that the existing specifications support their scenarios. Vendors and customers may use the new specifications and functions when needing the common capabilities."
"The result [of the effort] will eventually provide an industry-wide set of standards for resources access and eventing that will be useful for many scenarios in management integration, manageability, and grid computing," the white paper states.
The effort involves converging the WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) and WS-Management specifications. The result will be the simplifying of platform interoperability, solution development and the process of standardizing a new common set of specifications, HP's representative said.
New specifications are being authored entitled WS-Transfer Addendum and WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT) A new version of the WS-MetadataExchange also is being developed.
WS-Transfer Addendum enables changes in WS-MetadataExchange to allow better integration with the WS-Transfer specification. WS-RT (new) defines body elements for Create', Get', and Put' that support creating, retrieving, and updating partial elements of a resource.
Sun Microsystems is not involved in the project, according to HP.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 17, 2006 11:46 AM
March 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
A post on the Official Google Blog confirmed on Thursday some rumour it had purchased the web-based collaborative word processor Writely.
Coupled with the recent news a Google Calendar is in the works the latest revelation makes some think a Google Office suite is near.
Business 2.0's Om Malik, who broke the rumor on his blog, writes: "Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice."
But Malik notes, and I agree, people are conditioned to use MS Office, but even if Google Writely is free, who wants sensitive business documents living on Google's servers? So forget the enterprise for some time.
I've had people say they didn't want to send me stuff to Gmail because they feared it would threaten their privacy.
Well, at least this time Google is following Microsoft.
Look out Microsoft Office? InfoWorld's Paul Krill says, "maybe in 15 years".
What do you think. Would you jump aboard Google Office?
Posted by Mike Barton on March 9, 2006 03:51 PM
February 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
OASIS on Wednesday announced the approval of the WS-Security 1.1 specification as an OASIS Standard.
The approval gives the specification OASIS's highest level of ratification. WS-Security is always mentioned as one of the more high-profile Web services specifications, among the many that are out there. WS-Security provides functions such as integrity and confidentiality in messages implementing higher level Web services applications, according to OASIS.
Included in version 1.1 are extra profiles for Kerberos, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), SOAP with Attachments and Rights Expression Language.
OASIS listed vendors collaborating on the specification, which reads like a Who's Who of computer vendors. The list includes: Actional, Adobe, AmberPoint, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Computer Associates, EMC, Forum Systems, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Neustar, Nokia, Oracle, Reactivity, RSA Security, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Tibco, VeriSign, and others.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 15, 2006 08:42 AM
January 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
REST (Representational State Transfer), which is viewed as an alternative to SOAP-based Web services, is being tailored for use in Java.
The Restlet open source project, authored by Jerome Louvel, founder of Noelios Consulting, is intended to bring the simplicity and efficiency of REST to Java developers, Louvel said in an email. The project serves as a framework for REST written in Java and is composed of two parts: a neutral Restlet API and a reference implementation called the Noelios Restlet Engine.
The API is an alternative to the Servlet API solving most issues and limitations, according to Louvel. If adopted by developers, the Restlet API will be submitted to the Java community Process or to an organization such as the Apache Software Foundation.
"When I started the development of a new Web site, I looked for a framework that could help me build an application respecting the REST concepts and allowing the maximum scalability," Louvel said. "As I couldn't find a solution, Restlets started as an attempt to build a REST framework on top of the Servlet API. However, Servlets lack clear separation between the transport protocol concerns and the Web application concerns; they have direct control of low-level aspects of HTTP like headers and output stream, which makes it very hard for Servlet engines to optimize and scale applications."
"So, Restlets ended up as a complete alternative to Servlets," Louvel explained. Restlets expose only a REST interface to developers and are protocol-independent, he said. Restlet applications can be client-or server-side or peer-to-peer, Louvel said.
Additionally, Restlet is geared toward Web 2.0 applications. "Restlet is an excellent foundation for Web 2.0 applications because it naturally supports AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML), lightweight REST Web services (simple exchange of XML documents via HTTP), RSS feeds, URI as the UI and the refocus on data," Louvel said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 10, 2006 11:28 AM
December 13, 2005 | Comments: (0)
IBM on Wednesday plans to unveil development tools that utilize the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification, pronounced "wisdom," for systems management.
WSDM, which was approved as an OASIS standard on March 9, enables use of Web services to build management applications. It applies a common management interface across an environment and allows management software from different vendors to work together, according to IBM.
Available on the company's alphaWorks site for emerging technologies, the tools are being offered for free use for 90 days. Tools, which are part of the IBM Autonomic Integrated Development Environment, include the following:
* IBM Autonomic Manageability Endpoint Builder, for building WSDM interfaces for resources such as printers, servers and applications. The software is available as a plug-in to the Eclipse open source tools platform. IBM's autonomic computing initiative has involved development of self-managing systems.
* IBM Autonomic Manageability Endpoint Simulator, for simplifying the development of autonomic systems by connecting resources with autonomic management applications.
* IBM Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators, a spreadsheet-based environment for composing system management tasks for Web-based consoles. A plug-in allows the tool to communicate with WSDM resources.
IBM plans to incorporate WSDM technology into products delivered by its WebSphere, Tivoli and IBM Systems groups during the next 12 months. The company also plans to have demonstrations on alphaWorks that show WSDM in action.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 13, 2005 01:31 PM
October 26, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Secure Web services messaging eyed
With Web services and SOA growing in importance in enterprises, OASIS continues to boost its efforts to advance Web services standardization, with security again the focus of a new initiative.
OASIS on Wednesday announced plans to define extensions to the WS-Security standard for Web services to enable the trusted exchange of multiple SOAP messages. OASIS also will define security policies that govern formats and tokens of those messages.
The newly formed OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee features vendors and users who will finalize a set of specfications based on three initial contributions: WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-Trust.
The committee will advance a set of specifications to standardize concepts, WSDL documents and XML Schema renderings for trusted brokering of SOAP message exchanges, shared security contexts and security policies, OASIS said.
Among the members of the committee are companies such as Actional, Adobe, BMC Software, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Iona, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Tibco, VeriSign and webMethods.
"We continue to see increasing demand for secure Web services from our clients deploying advanced SOA solutions," said Karla Norsworthy, vice president, IBM Software Standards, in a prepared statement released by OASIS. "The specifications contributed to the OASIS WS-SX Committee provide customers the ability to establish trust relationships that span long-running exchange and provide interoperability for real world scenarios."
The committee will hold its first meeting on December 7-8.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 26, 2005 11:20 AM
October 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)
ObjectWeb this week plans to formally roll out its open source Petals project, which will serve as a Java Business Integration (JBI) container to complement the Iona Celtix enterprise service bus project.
Petals will provide functionality such as the ability run business-to-business services on Celtix. Its goal is to provide a lightweight service-oriented platform around JBI.
"The Petals project is an implementation of the JBI specification and it's going to actually reuse Celtix. It will complement the Celtix project," said Francois Letellier, a member of the ObjectWeb executive committee.
Already in a proof-of-concept phase, the first release of Petals is expected by the end of this year.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 24, 2005 10:32 AM
October 13, 2005 | Comments: (0)
OASIS eyeing Web services transaction standards
OASIS is focusing on Web services transactions standards with the formation of a committee to define a set of protocols for coodinating the outcome of distributed application actions.
The OASIS Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) Technical Commitee will finalize a set of specifications based on WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity technologies. Among the supporters of WS-TX are BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
This latest effort joins a myriad of other Web services standardization activity already going on at OASIS and the World Wide Web Consortium.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 13, 2005 01:23 PM
September 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Rather than being a futuristic concept, SOA is here now and benefitting enterprises, according to panelists at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.
Panelists from companies such as EDS and ING touted the benefits of SOA in enabling adapatibility in an age of global competition
"We found SOAs to be a very useful technology that allows us to capture the value of legacy systems [and] encapsulate that value in the form of services," said J.R. Jesson, CTO of applications and industry frameworks portfolio at EDS.
"We're realizing globally as we compete up the chain in the marketplace, we're providing business results to customers. We must provide that at the speed of customers," Jesson said.
At Fidelity Information Services, the company deployed an SOA to help it cope with managing 40 systems and applications that were gained through acquisitions. The company also had eight different middleware systems. Technologies such as Java and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) have figured prominently in Fidelity's SOA, according to Miguel Rotella, senior vice president of integration solutions at Fidelity. SOA and Oracle's software stack help provide flexibility, Rotella said.
"[The stack] gives us that standards orientation," he said.
An official from Deutsche Post, a German bank, said the bank started an SOA initiative in 1999. "Today, the current discussion is how you can implement an SOA and one of the answers is an ESB (enterprise service bus)," said Michael Herr, a senior director at the bank.
Web services, while key to implementing an SOA, are not the be-all-to-end-all for such an architecture.
"Web services itself [is] very helpful, but not enough," Herr said. An SOA backplane is needed that is flexible enough to integrate existing infrastructure, Herr said.
Oracle, like rivals including IBM and BEA, appears intent on riding the SOA wave. With the potential sales of software and services that could arise in implementing SOAs, who can blame these vendors?
Posted by Paul Krill on September 19, 2005 04:32 PM
June 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BEA Systems on Thursday is rolling out several products as part of its service infrastructure strategy, which had been codenamed Project Free Flow.
The company also is launching the tagline, "Think liquid," as part of its goal to help users free up IT assets to become enterprise liquid assets.
New products include BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, which is an enterprise service bus formerly known as QuickSilver. Due this summer, the product will carry a list price not to exceed $45,000 per CPU.
The BEA AquaLogic Service Registry provides UDDI directory services for SOA governance and lifecycle management. The product is being made by Systinet but will carry the BEA name. Pricing is yet to be determined.
The Liquid Data product for offering a single view of data sources has been renamed the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform. It features read and write data capabilities as opposed its previous read-only capability. Availability is planned for this month, with list pricing starting at $10,000 per CPU.
The fourth product is BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security, a security infrastructure formerly known as WebLogic Enterprise Security. Shipping now, it costs $75,000 for the administrative application and $10,000 per CPU for for security modules.
Future AquaLogic products may include Process, for services management; Portal, for information worker productivity; and Composer, a tool environment for AquaLogic products.
Posted by Paul Krill on June 9, 2005 10:29 AM
May 11, 2005 | Comments: (0)
IEEE creates services computing community
Using the umbrella phrase 'services computing' the IEEE this morning announced the IEEE Services Computing Community. Within the context of the newly created community, IEEE classifies services as Web services, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), business process integration, autonomic, grid and utility computing.
A member of the community provided this description of the group:
Services Computing has become a cross-discipline that covers the science and technology of Services Innovation Research, which leverages IT and computing technology to model, create, and manage business solutions, scientific applications, as well as modernized services. The underneath technology suite includes Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), business consulting methodology and utilities, business process modeling, transformation and integration.
This scope of Services Computing covers the whole lifecycle of services innovation research that includes business componentization, services modeling, services creation, services realization, services annotation, services deployment, services discovery, services composition, services delivery, service-to-service collaboration, services monitoring, services optimization, as well as services management. The goal of Services Computing is to enable IT services and computing technology to perform business services more efficiently and effectively.
Other materials provided by IEEE state:
Our Services Computing community aims to bridge the gap between Business Services and IT Services with a new ground breaking technology suite that includes Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process integration and management, utility/grid computing and autonomic computing.
Although not typically lumped into a single category, those various technologies are a natural fit, and I'll be interested and watching to see exactly what IEEE comes up with.
The link to the IEEE Services Computing community page is:
https://www.ieeecommunities.org/services. (Subscription required.)
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 11, 2005 01:41 PM
May 03, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Memo to IBM, Microsoft, etc: Get with the program
OASIS this week announced formation of a committee to develop a reference model for SOAs. Now, if the major vendors in this space would only show some enthusiasm.
Inquiries were made by myself to Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems about their interest in this endeavor. Only Oracle, to its credit, has responded to me, and the prognosis was not good. In short, Oracle said, "Given the pace of standardization, profiling and vendor offerings at this point, it is premature to converge on a single reference architecture."
What is the problem with a reference architecture? Standards are good, aren't they? All these companies claim to back standards. We sure don't want nonstandardized, proprietary SOAs popping up now, do we? Well?
Hopefully, all these companies, whose support is critical, will get with the program and endorse the OASIS effort, if they're not quietly doing so already.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 3, 2005 10:31 AM
December 23, 2004 | Comments: (0)
ZapThink's SOA Forecast For Next Year
Analyst firm ZapThink issued a report that included its predictions for the fate of service-oriented architectures in 2005.
The authors kept it short and sweet, listing but three items:
*WS-I Gets Going or Gets Out --
The group has yet to deliver on the necessary profiles for security, process, and reliability – three significant minefields full of specifications that lack cohesive vendor support and have widespread disagreement. In order for the WS-I to prove their relevance, the group must not only produce profiles that cover those areas, but must also garner enough respect from vendors and implementers to make their word law in the SOA nation.
*Companies will Make More Money on SOA Services than on SOA Products --
In many ways that was true of the early years, but increasingly there is a real market for both products as well as implementation services for SOA. The past nine months or so have seen a dramatic increase in the number of professional service firms that have either opened a new division solely focused on SOA or significantly expanded an existing practice.
*ESB Use it or Lose it --
Once a vaguely-defined term that nevertheless carried with it some specific functionality requirements and implementation implications, the ESB term now refers to a hodgepodge of mostly unrelated products, disparate feature and function sets, and confused vendor product messaging that seems to be more a definition of chaos than a specific functionality set. Some ESB vendors include a message bus infrastructure, while others don’t. Some ESB vendors provide business-process modeling and runtime capabilities, while others simply provide an event-driven runtime infrastructure. More gravely, some vendors are distancing themselves from the idea that ESB is even a product category – but rather an architectural framework for SOA.
As a result, ESB has now come to mean "any technology that is required to implement an SOA." As such, without a more concrete definition of the capabilities and functionality that an ESB provides, the term will either become meaningless, or will be given a more narrowly defined and concise definition. So, in 2005, the ESB term will either shift to a realistic, understandable, and meaningful meaning, or disappear from the SOA lexicon forever.
The bottom line is that the thus far ballyhooed and acronym'd terms and technologies need to move out of the abstract and into the concrete during 2005.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 23, 2004 05:35 AM
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