I have spent the last week in the rainy Seattle area together with Harold, Jiandong and Rama. We've attended a WS Interoperability Plugfest event organized by Microsoft and focused on testing interoperability of WS stack implementations from different vendors. This time we focused on testing our Metro implementations of standard versions of WS-* specifications as well as validating backwards compatibility with their older counterparts.[Read More]

Last week Fabian was busy putting togehter web pages and content of the new Policy project on java.net. Now the work is almost finished.[Read More]

Whenever you ask NetBeans to create a new file (such as Java class or interface or an XML file) for you, it internally uses respective file template to generate the file content for you. This is particularly useful as it relieves you from a need to write boilerplate text, that may in case of Java files include things like package name, class definition, basic documentation (including author name) or a license text.[Read More]

These days we are focusing on fine-tuning quality of WSIT 1.0 that will be released soon. If you want do play with it, feel free to download the latest build. As there are no open issues in policy engine, I found some time to create a screencast (actually this is my first screencast ever!) about the WS-Policy and how it is used in WSIT. Enjoy!

Technorati: Interoperability, Java, J2EE, Open Source, Web Services, WSIT, WS-Policy

Hi there! It has been some time since my last entry on this blog. In my blog entries I usually describe topics I want to. Now I would like to let you know, that if you have a question about WSIT that you would like to ask, please send it to us during the week of April 30 at the next Ask the experts session dedicated to WSIT and project Tango. Your questions will be answered by Harold Carr, Arun Gupta and me.

Technorati: Interoperability, Java, J2EE, Open Source, Web Services, WSIT, WS-Policy

In my last blog entry about WSIT project, I tried to explain WHAT policy means in context of web services. In this follow-up I will try to bring more light to the question HOW does it all work.[Read More]

WSIT project Milestone 3 was just released. And that is a great opportunity for me to try to share some thoughts that should help you to find the answer to the question from the title of this blog. Lets apply a divide and conquer strategy so that we can address the two topics the question contains separately. In this blog we would find out what the term web service policy actually means.[Read More]

Today I had a longer discussion on solving one problem that involved applying some XML schema/type definition technology. We ended discussing two possibilities - XSD and RelaxNG. I was a proponent of XSD just because I believe it is more accepted by a developer community and - of course - because I am much more familiar with it :)

However I am pretty interested if I am right - if the XSD is really more known and accepted by a developer comunity compared to RelaxNG. So I would like to hear your opinion on that subject. The comments section bellow is ready for you...

In my last blog I discussed the rise of a new era in SOA development with the use of Java Web Services technology powered by the implementation of WS-* specifications. Today, I would like to write few lines about policy metadata - the real core of these new technologies.

Policy language and its usage is described in two separate specifications (which have already been submitted for standardization by W3 Consortium):

• Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) specification and
• Web Services Policy Attachment (WS-PolicyAttachment) specification

These two specifications bind all other WS-* specifications together into one complex solution.

The main goal of the WS-Policy specification is to introduce a flexible and extensible way of expressing and understanding the capabilities, requirements and general web service properties. In other words, WS-Policy provides a web services policy language together with domain-neutral rules as to how to process and interpret these policies. To complement the WS-Policy specification - which is strictly focused on defining policy language - WS-PolicyAttachment completes the whole picture by defining the means of attaching actual policy expresions to policy subjects to which these expressions apply. This second specification also describes the way how to use policies in the context of web services description mechanisms – WSDL and UDDI.

WSIT introduces its own policy engine and I am a part of a team working on its design and implementation. We do our best to make sure the implementation is interoperable and - of course - fully compliant with WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment specifications. Currently, we are still in a development phase and there's much to be tested and polished yet. But we have already achieved success in supporting all main use case scenarios as well as having demonstrated our ability to interoperate with policy engines from other vendors at several Interoperability workshops.

...and if you want to know even more about policy, don't forget to check the blogs of Jakub and Fabian - my project Tango team-mates.

Technorati: Interoperability, Java, J2EE, open source, web services, wsit, ws-policy

I recently joined Sun Microsystems, Inc. to work in the exciting field of Java Web Services technologies. Thus it is not surprising that I am going to touch on this technology here.

As many of you probably know, web services play an integral part in SOA driven design and development nowadays. This technology emphasizes interoperability and platform independence, which makes it a very important part of most enterprise integration solutions today.

However until recently - in order to set up and deploy a web service and successfully configure its client(s) - lots of duplicated manual administration was required on both sides when configuring all those "extra" features, such as atomic transactions, secured communication, reliable messaging etc. Another issue one had to consider with such advanced web service communication channel configuration was a possible loss of interoperability. Many people working in this area could feel this strong need to change it: to automatize configuration of communication channel as much as possible, so that both - client and service - just need to agree on a set of applicable communication policies and express those in a commonly understandable and widely accepted language.

But this is changing right now! A set of WS-* specifications was introduced to address these issues. Today I am a part of project Tango where we, together with other Sun's Java Web Services engineers involved, are focused on addressing these issues. One of the main goals of this project is to bring to life the new generation of Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) - an open source java implementation of WS-* specifications that enables all this cool stuff to happen while also ensuring interoperability with other vendors.

So are you interested? If yes, the development version of WSIT is there ready for you to download and play with. And don't forget to try it out together with new 5.5 beta release of NetBeans™ IDE and its WSIT modules.

...and - of course - if possible, you should definitely come and join our Java One sessions, where you can

• see the big picture of it,
• watch a tutorial on it,
• get involved and play with it or
• learn something more specific about it

Java One conference is indeed a great place where you can get lots of new information about our work and of course, about Java.

Technorati: Interoperability, Java, J2EE, Open source, SOA, Web services, WSIT