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Fourth Microsoft Interop Plugfest Report

As reported earlier, Metro team from Sun participated in the fourth (third, second, first) Microsoft Interop Plugfest. Microsoft is working on .NET 3.5 (codename Orcas) and the focus this time was to ensure that there are no regressions with WSIT 1.0. Read Harold's report for more details.

Technorati: webservices metro plugfest glassfish microsoft interoperability

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[4]

Yet Another Microsoft Interop Plugfest

Microsoft announced a 3-day Web services interoperability plugfest from Jul 10-12, 2007. At Sun Microsystems, we love to Tango with Windows Communication Foundation component of .NET 3.0 framework and so we'll be participating using GlassFish V2. This may be the last plugfest before GlassFish V2 is released later this year.

As in earlier events, attendees implement a set of pre-defined scenarios based on WS-* specs using their Web services stack. They participate with implementation on their laptops and interoperate using their client and Microsoft endpoint and vice versa.

The set of scenarios are based on the following specifications:

• Basic Messaging Scenarios using protocols: SOAP1.1, SOAP1.2, WS-Addressing 2004/08 and 2005/10, MTOM
• Message Security Scenarios using WS-Security 1.0, WS-Security 1.1, WS Secure Conversation 2005/02, WS-Trust 2005/02, Username Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), X509 Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), SAML Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), Kerberos Token Profile 1.1.
• STS - Security Token Service scenarios
• Reliable Messaging using WS-ReliableMessaging v1.0 (2005/02)
• Transactions using WS-AtomicTransaction v1.0 (2004/10) and WS-Coordination v1.0 (2004/10)
• WS-Policy v1.2 (2004/09) and WS-Metadata Exchange (2004/09) are included in several scenarios
• Windows CardSpace scenarios

Microsoft is also looking for interop testing with pre-release version of .NET Framework 3.5 (codename Orcas) with the following versions of specifications:

• Message Security Scenarios using WS Secure Conversation v1.3 (2005/12), WS-Trust v1.3 (2005/12)
• RX - Reliable Messaging using WS-Reliable Messaging v1.1 (2007/02)
• Transactions using WS-Atomic Transaction v1.1 (2006/06) and WS-Coordination v1.1 (2006/06)
• WS-Policy v1.5

We run the interop tests regularly with our builds. The results for Tango M5 milestone build shows details for each technology.

Microsoft still need to work out some kinks before the real work can begin:

• The plugfest schedule still seem to be dated March
• Not all the scenarios and endpoints as mentioned in the announcement are available
• Invite logistics page is giving a 404
• Not all the endpoints are up, atleast RM endpoints are down. Anyway, the endpoints have been down at multiple instances (here, here, here, here and probably other times too!).

But we are still going to participate :) Sun's participation in the previous plugfests can be followed here.

Technorati: webservices wsit plugfest glassfish microsoft interoperability

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[3]

Interop Plugfest: Behind the curtains

Read Jorgen's interview on The Server Side about how the Interop plugfests at Microsoft are arranged. There is full section talking about WSIT and WCF interoperability towards the end of the interview. As mentioned in my previous plugfest reports (1, 2, 3), we have incrementally achieved a very good level of interoperability with Microsoft. And this is also evident (Green and Yellow is good) in the slide used at Microsoft tracking WS-* adoption in the industry.

WSIT technologies are available in GlassFish.

Technorati: Web Services GlassFish WSIT WCF

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[0]

WSIT and WCF Plugfest

"I" in WSIT stands for Interoperability. To ensure WSIT is interoperable with .NET 3.0, WSIT engineers made a third visit to Microsoft headquarters in less than a year. Microsoft hosted the third plugfest at their campus and Sun Microsystems showed up to test WSIT and GlassFish interoperability with their upcoming .NET 3.0 stack.

Harold, Mike, Jiandong, Joe, Ken and myself (all from Sun) "wsited" Microsoft last week. We were just representations of the bigger team and effort scattered all over the globe (Santa Clara, Burlington, Salt Lake City, Portland, Prague, Germany, France, Bangalore). And then there were some engineers doing remote testing as well.

As mentioned earlier, WS-Addressing functionality in JAX-WSA is cleaned up and now an integral part of  JAX-WS 2.1 RI. That has been my focus for the past few weeks. So in this plug-fest, I took our JAX-WS 2.1 RI for interop on WS-Addressing test cases. Microsoft has caused a few interop problems with WS-Addressing in the past (Member Submission policy assertion namespace change, incorrect Action from WCF client, WS-Addressing WSDL namespace change). But this time everything worked, it just worked. And that's what is out-of-the-box interoperability.

Other than that, we had a good success rate doing interop on WS-Atomic Transactions, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Secure Conversation, WSS 1.0 and 1.1, WS-Trust. We achieved interop on composite scenarios like Secure Reliable Messaging and Secure MTOM. And this interop is two-way meaning that WCF client invoke WSIT endpoint and WSIT client invoke WCF endpoint.

We care about "I", the most, in WSIT. GlassFish v2 now integrates WSIT bits on a regular basis. When GlassFish v2 goes final, be assured it will be interoperable with .NET 3.0 framework shipping in Windows Vista and other platforms.

Read about our success stories from first and second plugfests.

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[3]

Upcoming WCF Plugfest

Microsoft is hosting a Windows Communication Foundation (a.k.a. Indigo) interop plug-fest in Seattle from Sep 26-28. Sun Microsystems will participate in this plug-fest as we did during the previous two (Mar 2006, Nov 2005). We will be taking WSIT and GlassFish for all the interop testing.

I'll post another blog entry, with our interop report, after the plug-fest.

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[1]

Bigger and Better and Second Plugfest!

As reported earlier, Sun particiapted in the second plugfest hosted by Microsoft. Harold, Vivek, Mike, Jiandong and myself (all from Sun) spent most of the week in Redmond testing interoperability between Sun's Project Tango technologies and Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation. There were other Sun participants engaged remotely as well.

Again as mentioned, we were bigger and performed much better than the last plugfest. We tested interoperability of implementations of WS-Addressing (both W3C CR Core and SOAP Binding and W3C Member Submission), MTOM, Reliable Messaging, Schema and WSDL, Web Services Security 1.0 and Metadata Exchange. The source code of these implementations will be available in Glassfish and binaries in the Java Web Services Developer Pack in the future.

Robert Scoble stopped by during lunch yesterday and talked to us about our visit. As always, our answer was "It's all about customers"!. I'll post a link to the video log whenever it's available. Kirill and Jorgen were the main host and a bunch of other Microsoft engineers were present to help debug the problems through out the day.

I think the social aspect of participating in the plugfest really helps us to resolve problems quicker at the engineering level, when working remotely. Check out the some pictures from our participation at the plugfest.

BTW, catching up on my blog entries, I found Yasser Shohoud from Microsoft posted a link to WCF architecture overview and it's a good read!

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |