Web Services A look to the future

By Dr Colin Adam

WebServices.Org

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SOAP provides message interoperability between software components

WSDL provides description of service to provide interoperability between development tools

These successes have lead to developers wanting more capabilities

So where do we go from here?

We Need More Standards

[WS-Acknowledgement][WS-ActiveProfile][WS-Addressing][WS-Attachments][WS-Authorization][WS-AtomicTransaction][WS-BusinessActivity][WS-CAF][WS-Callback][WS-Coordination] [WS-Federation][WS-Inspection][WS-Manageability] [WS-PassiveProfile] [WS-EndpointResolution][WS-MessageData] [WS-MetadataExchange] [WS-Policy][WS-PolicyAssertions][WS-PolicyAttachment] [WS-Provisioning][WS-Privacy][WS-Referral][WS-Reliability][WS-ReliableMessaging] [WS-Routing][WS-Referral][WS-SecureConversation][WS-Security][WS-SecurityPolicy][WS-Transaction][WS-TransmissionControl][WS-Trust][BPEL4WS][WS-Choreography][WSRP][WSXL]

Standards are good..

"These are the infrastructure pieces that will lead to an explosion in web services“ Bill Gates

BUT“We face a key engineering challenge: How do we

give Web services new security, reliability, and transaction capabilities without adding more complexity than needed” Donald Ferguson, IBM

A basis for the future

A general-purpose, composable protocol framework

Protocols are factored from both transports and application semantics

Architecture is metadata-driven, policy-based

Broad industry partnership

The Protocol Framework

Transports HTTP, UDP, … Transports HTTP, UDP, …

XML XML, XSD, XPath, … XML XML, XSD, XPath, …

Messaging SOAP, WS-Addressing, …Messaging SOAP, WS-Addressing, …

SecurityWS-Security

WS-TrustWS-Federation

…

SecurityWS-Security

WS-TrustWS-Federation

…

ReliabilityWS-ReliableMessaging

…

ReliabilityWS-ReliableMessaging

…

TransactionsWS-TransactionWS-Coordination

…

TransactionsWS-TransactionWS-Coordination

…

Met

adat

aW

SD

L, W

S-P

olic

y, …

Met

adat

aW

SD

L, W

S-P

olic

y, …

Composing a message

AddressingAddressing

<S:Envelope … > <S:Header> <wsa:ReplyTo> <wsa:Address>http://business456.com/User12</wsa:Address> </wsa:ReplyTo> <wsa:To>http://fabrikam123.com/Traffic</wsa:To> <wsa:Action>http://fabrikam123.com/Traffic/Status</wsa:Action> <wssec:Security> <wssec:BinarySecurityToken ValueType="wssec:X509v3" EncodingType=“wssec:Base64Binary">      dWJzY3JpYmVyLVBlc…..eFw0wMTEwMTAwMD </wssec:BinarySecurityToken> </wssec:Security> <wsrm:Sequence>zzz <wsu:Identifier>http://fabrikam123.com/seq1234</wsu:Identifier> <wsrm:MessageNumber>10</wsrm:MessageNumber> </wsrm:Sequence> </S:Header> <S:Body> <app:TrafficStatus xmlns:app="http://highwaymon.org/payloads"> <road>520W</road><speed>3MPH</speed> </app:TrafficStatus> </S:Body></S:Envelope>

SecuritySecurity

ReliabilityReliability

Then What?

Assume we have the standards and architecture

Standards are no good without implementations

Standards need to be “policed”How will any developer possibly use them

since they are complicated and numerous?

Implementations

Java Community Process – lots of JSRs on the go

Microsoft’s IndigoNew tools such as Sun Java Studio

Creator (out soon), Microsoft Visual Studio, BEA WebLogic Workshop, Eclipse

Developer Utopia

Drop down menu of Web services specific to his/her IDE settings

Intellisense Web services calls Automatic serialisation of data into XML Automatic performance tweaking Orchestration/Business Logic mapping Visual Data Mapping to legacy Automatic handling of security, reliability,

transactions. Constraints placed on declarations possible

BEA’s Weblogic Workshop

Indigo

“Indigo unifies a wide range of transports (HTTP, TCP, UDP, IPC), security mechanisms (public and symmetric keys, certificates), topologies (point-to-point, end-to-end through intermediaries, peer-to-peer, publish-and-subscribe), and assurances (transacted, reliable, durable) enabling Indigo to provide rich connectivity to many existing systems. “ Don Box

What Microsoft Says

"Indigo" is a new approach to building and running connected systems built from the ground up around the Web services architecture. “ BillG

“You can either do a lot in declarative statements to let you build these services. If you go to the next level down in the architecture, there are connectors and channels for you to import “ Jim Allchin

Policing The Standards

• Standards are held at different organisations

• Implementations need to interoperate

• Vendors needs somewhere to “talk”

• Test tools for compatibility

“WS-I fulfills a need by providing clarifications and constraints on those de facto standards that will enable vendors and developers to implement and use these technologies in an interoperable manner. “ Chris Ferris speaking to ws.org

A few challenges for the future

Extensibility - Need to avoid “big-bang” upgrades – The Web does this well

Evolvability – Need to work on versioning – forwards-backwards compatibility

Early binding – re-use tried and trusted semantics and stick to them

Asynchronous – let’s not wait for each other

My predications

2004 will see some final specifications on QoS going through OASIS/W3C

2005 Indigo will go head to head with Java and win a lot of hearts and minds

2006 80% code on new projects will be WS-I complaint 2007 Peoples lives will be made easier with Web

services 2010 nearly all software created from within a SOA and

XML natural language tools 2020 NHS changes its name to NHWS (National Health

Web Service) 2030 - Last mainframe sold.

NHS -> NHWS

The NHS requires new protocols and implementations now, not later.

Stay away from RYO approaches. Open source has a lot of advantages and is just

as good, if not better Think in terms of loose coupling and constraints

therein Get some good IT Architects Decide what will join the web services together

The end

Any Questions?