Category: Web Services

Apache Mirae: Web Services for J2ME

The Apache Mirae project is attempting to extend the support of Web Services out to the Java application that run on mobile devices using the J2ME platform based on the JSR-172 specification request.

Links
Apache Mirae Project

XFire: Java Web Services Framework

While browsing through my numerous RSS feeds I stumbled on a release note for the XFire Java Web Service library. There are lots of Java Web Service frameworks available on the Internet and most are available for free use (eg Apache AXIS, Sun's JWSDP, IBM WebSphere, etc). The problem with many of them are that they do not support some of the newest Web Service standards. As I work in a research area where we are always pushing the envelopes and therefore using bleeding edge standards libraries that support the new standards are always useful. XFile supports a number of different bindings including XMLBeans, JAXB and AEGIS (XML to POJO binding) to easily create your back end service code. There is also early support to both WS-Addressing and WS-Security standards, which most Web Service frameworks do not support and to put the icing on the cake it supports multiple transports (including HTTP, JMS, Local and XMPP). More work is still required to make it a complete Web Services framework that supports all the new standards but it is well on its way.

Links
XFire Home Page

Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO)

In the eclipse plugin feed that I am subscribed to I noticed the WSMO Studio plugin. On further research I have found out that this is an editor for the WSML and related ontologies for use in web services. This seems to be a part of the semantic web research that is occurring around the world for trying to correlate, reason and determine relationships between disparate sources of data. This type of research is extremely important when trying to get multiple service be interoperable within a complete Service Oriented Architecture within an Enterprise.

I still have not got a handle on the details of this but I am going to conduct some more research and potentially applying some of this work to my current job. So expect to see some more information about this in the near future.

Links
WSMO Working Group
WSMO Studio

Semantic Services

A friend from IBM just sent two links through to me for some Ontology and semantic based work IBM has on their Alphaworks site.

Ontology-based Web Services for Business Integration
A semantic Web services proof-of-concept demonstration for the industrial sector that shows service discovery, composition, and business process transformation.

Semantic Tools for Web Services
A set of Eclipse plug-ins for semantic matching and composition of Web services. (This is an ETTK technology.)

Links:
Ontology-based Web Services
Semantic Tools for Web Services
IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK)

OASIS drafts Blueprints for SOA

OASIS has started a new Technical working group to start defining Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) blueprints to facilitate applications being developed or re-factored into platform-agnostic services. The key players are all the same crowd, including BEA, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe Systems, Datapower, Infravio and Software AG. The catalyst documents being used are the blueprints originally developed by The Middleware Company analyst firm who sold the documents to a former employee for $1 as long as they were further developed and released license-free to the world developer community.

Links
SOA Center Service Oriented Architecture Blueprints
OASIS Web Services and SOA Technical Committees List
OASIS Adoption Blueprints TC

XQuery and Web Services

My report developed in conjunction with Andrew Barrow has finally been published as a DSTO report. The report outlines an approach to use XQuery in Web Service request to reduce the amount of traffic (data sizes) when web services have to respond with large XML documents and the client is only interested in small sections.

Links
DSTO XQuery Report

OASIS Announces Choreology Joining the JBoss Community

OASIS has just sent out an announcement that Choreology has joined the JBoss community which will bolster the support for Business Transaction Management. This will allow for the JBoss Application Server and JBoss jBPM (Business Process Management) to act as coordination points in distributed services deployed across heterogeneous environments.

Choreology's product is called Cohesions and implements OASIS Business Transaction Protocol and Web Services Coordination+Transaction.

Links
Choreology Home Site
JBoss Home Site

Microsoft Releases Web Service Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 Service Pack 3

Microsoft has released its update to the web services support in .NET, for more information or download go here.

BPMI to Start Work on BPXL

BPMI.org is planning a Think Tank meeting in Miami on March 1st 2005 to talk about the future of BPEL. BPMI is planning to start work on a new standard called Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL) that will help exchange information between process modeling tools and process management engines.

The original BPEL standard was developed through a OASIS Technical Committee. However BPMI see that this process would be too slow to develop the new standards and are therefore endeavoring to manage the new standards development themselves outside the confines of OASIS.

Links
Computer Business Review Article
BPMI.org
BPMI Think Tank Announcement

PeopleSoft Support WSRP

PeopleSoft recently demonstrated their PeopleSoft Community Portal and PeopleSoft applications interoperate with other portal implementations using Web Service for Remote Portlets (WSRP).

Links
PeopleSoft Support WSRP Article
OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets Technical Committee (WSRP TC)
WSRP 1.0 Standard

SOA in the UK Police

Here is a quick article about the UK Police using SOA concepts and Web Services to integrate their heterogeneous systems.

Links
UK Police and SOA article

WS-Reliability 1.1 Standard Approved

OASIS has announced that their WS-Reliability 1.1 standard for reliable messaging using web services has been approved by is members as an OASIS Standard. Here is a description of WS-Reliability 1.1 from the standard document itself:

“WS-Reliability is a SOAP-based ([SOAP 1.1] and [SOAP 1.2 Part 1]) specification that fulfills reliable messaging requirements critical to some applications of Web Services. SOAP over HTTP [RFC2616] is not sufficient when an application-level messaging protocol must also guarantee some level of reliability and security. This specification defines reliability in the context of current Web Services standards. This specification has been designed for use in combination with other complementary protocols (see Section 1.4) and builds on previous experiences (e.g., ebXML Message Service [ebMS].)”

See the links below to read more about WS-Reliability or to download the standard and associated schema files.

Links
WS-Reliability Article
WS-Reliability 1.1 Standard
OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging Technical Committee (WSRM TM)

WSMakeStubs Bug

I just spent the best half of a day trying to figure out how to use web services in Apple's Cocoa environment using the WSMakeStubs utility. WSMakeStubs takes a WSDL file and creates all the stub code required so “in theory” you can just use this stub code to make web service calls. Well this would be true if it was implemented correctly. I found that everytime I tried to use it I would get the following message appear on the log output:

in _parseFault

After a while of pulling my hair out I found this great discussion thread that identifies a problem with the WSMakeStubs program which is easily fixed by changing a few lines in the generated code.

Well I am no longer getting the “in _parseFault” message, on to the next bug :)

Links
Post on CocoaBuilder.com about WSMakeStubs bug
CocoaBuilder.com Site

“Rich” Web Clients

I am a keen advocate for “Rich” internet clients. By “Rich” I do not mean Java Applets, but web pages that provide a more complete user experience without having to request new pages from the server whenever the user clicks a button or link. There are few different approaches that provide this type of functionality including XUL (Mozilla Platform), Macromedia Flex and traditional JavaScript and DOM. Many web developers do not exploit the powerful capabilities provided with JavaScript and DOM. A recent example of this type of “Rich” client is Google's new Gmail capability that uses JavaScript and DOM to create a very quick and snappy user interface. By using JavaScript Google has been able to only send the basic requests and data transfers rather sending whole page changes back to the client. This of course takes quite a lot more client-side JavaScript development but does create a very powerful user interface. If you are interested in more information about the Gmail Agent API have a look here.

The Mozilla Platform is a more developer friendly approach as you define your application's interface in XUL and then link it together with JavaScript. However this approach requires your users to use a Mozilla-based browser (Mozilla or Firefox).

For the most interactive “Rich” client experience that will work on any browser Macromedia Flex is your product. Flex is based around a similar concept of Mozilla by defining your interface using XML documents and then linking it together with a scripting languages (Macromedia ActionScript). The difference is that Flex's client is built inside the Macromedia Flash player (available on almost every platform and browser), which allows for highly dynamic and pretty user interfaces. Flex is deployed using a J2EE server and can communicate back to the server by making Web Service calls or exchanging Java objects.

Gmail's approach works on all browsers but is technically much harder to implement. Mozilla's approach works well but requires a Mozilla-based browser. Macromedia's approach provides the best of both worlds but is not free and requires extensive server support. So if you are a web application developer please consider one of these options and provide a more advanced experience for your users.

Links
Mozilla Web Site
Firefox Site
Gmail Agent API Article
Macromedia Flex Site

Enterprise Agility: ESB, SOA, Web Services

Web Services Pipeline has another great article about web services by Fred Cummins. This article talks about enterprise agility and how Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services can help create an agile organisation. The article is a must read for anyone interested in the way web services are heading as it identifies a good list of requirements to support an Agile environment, or really any large web services deployment. The article also goes onto to concisely identify the middleware requirements and the components that create a complete enterprise service environment.

Links
Web Services Pipeline Article

IBM WebSphere 6 Announced

IBM has announced that its new version of WebSphere Application Server Version 6 will be available in December 2004. This is a key release from my point of view as this will be the first release of IBMs J2EE application server to support the J2EE 1.4 standards and of most importance includes Web Services as standard. In the previous J2EE standard Web Services were not included as a core technology, therefore each handled Web Services differently. This created a nightmare when moving code between J2EE servers implemented by different vendors. A pre release of WebSphere Application Server Version 6 has been available to developers for quite some time on the IBM website and is still available if you want to try it out before the official release in December.

Links
IBM Website
The Register Article on WebSphere 6
ZDNet Article on WebSphere 6
CNet Article on WebSphere 6
IBM WebSphere Developer Pre-release Download

Web Services vs REST

Jim Webber has a great article on WebServices.org about Web Services and REST and that these two architectures are converging. REST is all about defining a set of uniform APIs for accessing and manipulating data over HTTP, while Web Services is about the use of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI to allow for system communication. Jim Webber argues that originally Web Services was just the extension of similar technologies like CORBA but now it is evolving and allowing for more REST-like architectures that are more open and loosely coupled. If you are interested in web services and the direction they are heading then this article is a very good read.

Links
REST in Peach? - Article by Jim Webber
WebServices.org Site

SOA is only possible using Web Services

This article on the webservicespipeline.com site talks about another article by William Zentmayer who spouses that Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) are not possible without using web services. William does know that there are other technologies like CORBA that have been around for years that also can provide SOA-like capabilities. The interesting point made though is that web services provide such a low technology entry point and are so simple that any language, platform or system can implement web services allowing for extremely loosely coupled environments required by SOA that William Zentmayer argues that only Web Services can provide a true SOA capability.

Links
Webservicespipeline article
William Zentmayer's First Article
William Zentmayer's Second Article

WSRP 1.0 Primer Released

I know I have not blogged much lately about the web service standards but I have been pretty busy at work so have not wanted to do research in this area at home. However one important document has been released by OASIS about Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP).

“Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is a web services protocol for aggregating content and interactive web applications from remote sources.” - WSRP 1.0 Primer

This document is a primer to describing the concepts and implementation behind the WSRP standard for users who want to learn how to use this standard. The document is a public release and the WSRP team is requesting comments by the 14th October 2004.

Links
WSRP Primer 1.0 (PDF)
OASIS WSRP Technical Committee Page

ESRI embraces J2EE in ArcGIS 9

The recently released ESRI ArcGIS 9 includes support for the Sun Java Application Server which is the Sun Microsystems own J2EE server. By integrating ArcGIS with the Sun J2EE server it has allowed ESRI developers and users of their software to leverage upon the power of web services to seamlessly integrate geographic data with existing applications and business processes.

This is a profound step forward and can be leveraged upon in the recently started DSTO work on the Joint Command Support Environment (JCSE) that is ramping up support to the Geospatial and Imagery projects run under the Command Support Systems Branch of DMO. This DSTO work involves the development of a complete enterprise architecture for exposing and disseminating Geospatial and Imagery data within the ADF allowing such agencies as DIGO, DIO and DSD to share their products (normally distributed as individual files or hard copies) as digital products. This new architecture and use of integration technologies will allow the ADF to more seamlessly integrate Geospatial and Imagery data directly into existing and new applications and allow for a quicker and easier mechanism to distribute information. These advanced integration architectures will also allow for tighter control on the use of the data and more traceable security capabilities impossible with the current implementation methods.

Links
Sun Press Release
ESRI ArcGIS Product Page

Gluecode and Geromino

Gluecode who produces Portal and Business Process products has announced its support of the Open Source Geronimo project. Geronimo is an Apache Foundation project working towards releasing an open source J2EE container to rival the large J2EE providers like IBM and BEA.

Links
Apache Geronimo
Gluecode
Gluecode Products Page
Article on Gluecodes support to Geronimo

US MATRIX uses CTL like Architecture

A recent Slashdot article posts this statement:

Associated Press: 'The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange combines state vehicle and crime records with commercial databases owned by a private company, Seisint, covering half the U.S. population,' but there were 'questions about the legality of sending state-owned records to Seisint'. The solution? “Each state will maintain its own records . . . Software will search each state's records as necessary.'

The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange system, also known as MATRIX is now using a similar technique to get around jurisdiction and release laws by allowing the system to execute distributed searches so that each of the states can keep and maintain their own databases. Not this is not a new technique at all, but it is new for governments to use these concepts. I have also designed this same capability into the Coalition Theatre Logistics (CTL) project that I am the Australian Technical Manager for.

CTL has been operating since the year 2000 but only started true technical development in 2002. The aim of CTL is to provide a system that will allow multiple nations to share and access logistics information for coalition operations. The current CTL architecture was designed by myself using the familiar concepts developed for business to business transactions on the Internet but expanding the concepts to support the extra requirements of CTL.

Like MATRIX, CTL uses a similar distributed searching technique so that each nation owns their data on the coalition network and uses a series of coalition defined web services to allow other nations to access this data. This type of architecture allows for nations to maintain control over their data and selectively release this data to the network. The benefits of using a distributed data search and data access architecture are:

• Owners of data maintain control as they still own the databases containing the data.
• Different implementations of storage can be implemented in the national data storage areas as it does not affect the distributed search or coalition data access interfaces.
• Allows for the definition of standardised data access and transfer so that other nations can easily access the distributed network.
• Distributes the processing load for searching and storing of data
• Spreads the cost of implementation as each nation is responsible for their node on the coalition network.
• Allows for firewalls and other network filters to secure the national nodes on the network.
• Allows for flexible communication between nodes on the network

Distributed systems when crossing political boundaries allow for a much greater flexibility when compared with central data store solutions as it is near impossible to separate data when stored centrally. This merging of data in central data stores does not easily allow for multiple levels of security or separate data that is only releasable to certain audiences. By using distributed data stores allow for an easier method of applying security and controlling the data access, however the development of the clients and data access software becomes more complex. This complexity in developing the clients to access data is one of the reason such a design is avoided by many developers and a single data storage solution is chosen, but this is not necessarily the correct choice.

Over the next couple of months I will be producing a report as part of my work which will be publicly available and will provide access to a copy from here. The title of this report is “Multi-lateral Information Exchange Environment (MIEE) architecture” and will be available from the DSTO publications database or via the research link on the DSTO Home Page. You can also find all my publicly releasable reports by entering my full name (“Egon Kuster”) into the search area.

Links
Slashdot Article on MATRIX
Article on USA today
DSTO publications database
DSTO Home Page

ActiveBPEL becomes opensource

Active Endpoints has announced that its BPEL runtime engine has been released as open source. For more information read the press release or the article on TheServerSide.com site.

Links
ActiveBPEL Engine
Active Endpoints Press Release
TheServerSide.com Article

What is new in JWSDP 1.4

Sun has released version 1.4 of its very popular Java Web Service Development Pack (JWSDP). If you are interested in quickly finding out what is contained in version 1.4 have a read of this article on java.sun.com. The key updates are the support of all the latest Web Service Standards including the Basic Profile 1.1 standard, which is backward compatible with Basic Profile 1.0 so that it will still integrate with other web services. Also included is a UDDI registry and support of JSP and Java Servlets so it is possible to use the JWSDP to develop and run complete web applications using the bundled Apache Tomcat web container.

Links
Download JWSDP 1.4
Read What is new in JWSDP 1.4 article
java.sun.com

An Overview of Business Process Management (BPM)

InfoWorld has done it again by providing yet again a very interesting article about Business Process Management (BPM) by Eric Knorr. This article talks mainly about the use of the BPEL standard in supporting BPM but it does do a very good job of defining the overall problem and context of BPM and how BPEL supports business modeling. The article also concludes with a very brief (and I mean short) look at some of the other standards also being developed. What is still required is a good comparison between each of the competing standards, there is some work that I am conducting that should provide this outcome.

Links
Go to InfoWorld Article
Email Eric Knorr

Oracle ventures into Web Services, SOA, BPEL and J2EE

Oracle has been involved in J2EE application servers for quite some time now with their Oracle Application Server but with their newest release they are surfing the web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) wave. The newest version of JDeveloper supports full Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementations using a selection of technologies/standards including Struts, Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Server Pages (JSP) to develop your applications. To support SOA Oracle is supporting full development of Web Services and now includes BPEL support for services process execution modelling and execution via the recently acquired Oracle BPEL Process Manager product. All these technologies can be combined and developed using the graphical JDeveloper environment that also allows the developer to view the underlying XML structures. For more information about Oracle's Web Services support and the components supporting SOA, BPEL and MVC development go to this page.

Links
Oracle Web Services Page
Oracle Application Server
Oracle BPEL Process Manager product
JDeveloper

The speed of Web Services

I have implemented a number of web services projects and many of my critics have always commented that “web services are slow”. Well this is true, however there is a big “but” in this statement. Web services are slow when you compare them to such protocols like RMI (Remote Method Invocation) where you can transfer serialised objects between program components using tightly coupled, well known interfaces but this is not the area where web services should be used.

Web services have been developed for environments where you are unsure about the environment (including software, hardware, operating systems, processes and designs). Web services excel when you require information to be transfered from one system to another but do not own or know the details of the other system. These uncontrolled environments is where web services excel and RMI fails. This interoperability ease is why web services have done so well and with the Basic Profiles being developed by WS-I further improves interoperability between web service implementations.

Back to the original statement of why web services are slow. Web services are a very fat protocol as dealing with XML documents is a very CPU intensive process and sending XML documents is not an optimal solution because of the amount of data required to be transferred, for these reasons web services are slow. It is for these same reasons why web services are not the solution for everything, they do however provide a very useful capability when interconnecting disparate systems or developing a very dynamic and unstructured communication environment.

For a interesting discussion on the speed of web services have a read of Jeff Schneider's Blog on “The Suckline” where he discussed that web services provide the lowest common denominator when it comes to system interoperability.

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language

BPEL is still in the press and news feeds as the next new thing in the Web Services space. BPEL is a definition language that uses XML to define business processes at a level where business analysts can define an enterprises processes but in a structure that can be used to execute this defined process and coordinate web service activation.

A new article at InfoWorld talks about the BPEL standard. But BPEL is not the only fish in the sea with WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) and WSCL (Web Services Conversation Language) as competing standards under development by the W3C standards organisation. BPEL is being developed under the OASIS standards organisation and is supported by some of the larger application and middleware vendors like IBM, BEA and Microsoft. To stop the W3C and OASIS fighting about these standards Oracle and a few other vendors are starting work to coordinate between these standards efforts. The idea is for BPEL to focus on the internal processes while WSCL on external processes so that these two languages are complimentary. Time will tell as to which standard becomes dominant.

Service Oriented Architecture Presentation

The Pennsylvania State University has produced a very good powerpoint presentation outlining what Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is, its relationship with Business Process Management (BPM) and where these concepts have evolved from.

Download Presentation

BPML and BPEL4WS

The Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI) is an interesting organisation responsible for the development of three specifications, BPML (Business Processes Modeling Language), BPMN (Business Processing Modeling Notation), BPQL (Business Process Query Language). These specifications are to be used for the design and development of business processes. If you are familiar with BPEL then BPML is a superset of BPEL, for more details on the interelation then read this very short article. Also of interest is that the BPMI site has a very good list of articles about the Business Process modelling space and can be found here.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Many organisations and vendors are now providing external interfaces to applications via web services. These web services allow external applications to access the services or interact with the internal capabilities of the application. This simple service architecture allows for the basic application interaction and integration between systems, however these simple service framework does not support coordination to support workflows where a series of web services need to be called to support a single business process.

A new standard currently under development is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that defines these business processes. An extension to BPEL is BPEL for Web Service (BPEL4WS) that defines how BPEL can be used to define the required workflows when using web services.

IBM has released an article that describes the use of BPEL4WS in IBM WebSphere J2EE Server. The BPEL standard can be found in a number of locations on the Internet (go here).

For a List of the different web services both IBM and Microsoft provide a list of standards:
Go to IBM Web Services Standards Page
Go to Microsoft's Web Services Standards Page

Service Oriented Architecture Design

IBM has put out a paper about the lessons learnt from initial implementation projects using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The paper discusses the limitations of current analysis and design tools/techniques for use in building SOA based implementations. I highly recommend reading this article if you have anything to do with developing web services for enterprises or are endeavoring to identify your business requirements to start integrating your disparate or stove-piped systems.

Go to Article

Web Service Standards

There are way too many web service related standards in development or already available. For any developer new to web service of wanting to expand their abilities can easily be swamped by the numerous WS-* standards and what they are. Microsoft as part of its online MSDN library has a great site that contains information about most of these standards. The sites does not provide any way to identify which standards you should use in your application development or system integration but it does provide a way of finding information about what each of the standards contain.

Go to Microsoft Web Service Standards Site.