Sun Java Web Services (JWS) engineers are working with Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) engineers to ensure interoperability of enterprise features. such as security, reliable messaging and atomic transactions. At Sun, we call this work "Project Tango" and like to think of Duke doing the dance. This is accomplished by implementing a number of WS-* specifications and holding plugfests where our engineers work together for a week to test our implementations of those specifications. This entry maps the enterprise features to particular specifications and talks about interoperability testing. Source and binaries will be available in the upcoming weeks.

The enterprise features fall into four main categories: messaging, metadata, security and quality-of-service (QoS), as shown in the following figure:

Starting with the core XML support built into the Java platform, we use or extend existing features and add new support for:

• Messaging
  • SOAP: Support for the SOAP wire protocol is built into JAX-WS.
  • MTOM: JAX-WS also includes support for Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) for optimizing the wire format of SOAP messages.
  • WS-Addressing: supports normalized web service addresses, enabling multiple transports to be used (besides HTTP). JAX-WSA (i.e., JSR 261), the Java APIs for W3C Web Services Addressing is available in the Java Web Services Developer Pack now.
• Metadata
  • WSDL: Support for the Web Services Description Language is built into JAX-WS.
  • WS-Policy: Policies express and handle requirements and capabilities of web service consumers and providers.
  • WS-MetadataExchange: "WS-MEX" is a protocol to enable a consumer to obtain a service's metadata (i.e., its WSDL and policies). Think of it as a bootstrap mechanism for communication.
• Security
  • WS-SecurityPolicy: Defines specific policies (i.e., assertions) that describe how messages are secured.
  • WS-Security: Provides message content integrity and confidentiality (even in the presence of intermediaries).
  • WS-Trust: Provides methods for issuing, renewing, and validating security tokens used by WS-Security. It also provides ways to establish and broker trust relationships
  • WS-SecureConversation: Can be viewed as a security optimization (i.e., better message level security and efficiency in multiple-message exchanges).
• QoS
  • WS-ReliableMessaging: Enables a messaging system to recover from failures caused by messages that are lost or misordered in transit.
  • WS-Coord: A framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Used by WS-AtomicTransactions.
  • WS-AtomicTransactions: Supports two phase commit semantics such that either all operations invoked within an atomic transaction succeed or are all rolled back.

From a functional point-of-view the main features enabled by the above specifications are:

• bootstrapping communication
• securing communication
• optimizing communication
• enabling reliability
• enabling atomic transactions

In future entries I will provide more detail on these specifications and I will show how the specifications play together (i.e., compose) to provide enterprise features.

Interoperability Testing

Last November 2005 Sun and Microsoft engineers worked in the same room for a number of days testing the interoperability of our implementations. We will do this again next month, March 2006, at another "plugfest." Arun's blog is a good place to go to keep up-to-date on our plugfest progress and results.

Availability of JWS/WCF Interoperability Software

We plan to make Sun's interoperability software available in time for this year's Java One. Binaries will be available in the Java Web Services Developer Pack and source code will be available as part of the Glassfish community.

Technorati: Web Services SOA Glassfish jwsdp Tango Indigo WCF