Progress on both sets of Web Services specifications for JavaEE 6... On the RESTful side, Marc reports on a new specification draft. As usual, the JSR311 Website has full details including the Editors Draft and a Changelog. Marc points out there is still work pending in the integration with Servlet 3.0, EJB 3.1 and JSR 299. On the SOAP side, Rama announces a new implementation of the latest JAX-WS 2.2 Draft.

This week Harold gave the Metro Webinar, which is a good oppty to catch up with Metro news. There are two release families: GlassFish v2 and GF v3prelude uses the Metro 1.x releases while GlassFish v3 (post-prelude) will use Metro 2.0.

In today's (Thursday) webinar Harold will present on Metro, the GlassFish Web Services Stack. Metro is used in GlassFish, OpenSSO, OpenESB and a numer of JavaEE AppServers; one of its advantages is its strong interoperability with Microsofts's WCF in .Net. Presentation at 11am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page.

PS. A bit later in the day, at 1pm US Pacific, I will host an Overview of GlassFish Portfolio Announcements, in Spanish.

Metro, the Web Services stack, is one of the main components in GlassFish. One of its key benefits is excellent WebServices interoperability with the Microsoft stack, leveraging our relationship with MS. A consequence is showings in informal publications from Microsoft, like mszCool's Plans for 2009 and Identity Interoperability as well as in formal Federated Identity and Healthcare in the MS's The Architecture Journal. On a related note, O'Reilly has published Java Web Services: Up and Running - A quick, practical, and thorough introduction where Martin Kalin covers SOAP and RESTful Web Services in Java using Metro and Jersey.

For WebServices discussions, check out our Forum, and the mailing lists USERS@Metro and USERS@Jersey. Although we consider Jersey a piece of Metro - we love SOAP and REST equally :-) and the two parts are intended to mesh together - we are maintaining two mailing lists as the audiences tend to be disjoint.

There's been so much happening in the OpenSSO community over the past week or two, I haven't kept up with covering it here at The Aquarium. Here's a quick roundup:

Sun Super-SE Shesh Kondi describes how to deploy OpenSSO and its Java EE agents onto Weblogic on Mac OS X. This isn't a supported combination, but it's really handy for demos and development. At Sun Developer Network, the latest in the 'From the Trenches at Sun Identity' series, Sidharth Mishra talks to Marina Sum about Security for Web Services.

One I picked up on Google Alerts - Qingfeng Zhang has integrated OpenSSO with JA-SIG CAS, allowing users to login to CAS and access resources protected by OpenSSO.

If you haven't already given OpenSSO a whirl, go sign up to the project, download the bits and do it now - you may just win some goodies from the CafePress OpenSSO store.

Finally, a great example of an open source community in action - OpenSSO authentication providers for Spring and Seraph. These are integrations in the 'opposite direction' from the CAS one above, allowing users to login to OpenSSO and access resources protected by Spring Security and Atlassian Seraph (the latter used by Jira and Confluence).

To stay current on OpenSSO, subscribe to Planet OpenSSO (feed).

ArcGIS SOAP stack switched from Axis 1.x to Metro because of XML performance bottleneck. And they observed: "The result of this project is an increased performance of the ArcGIS Server's SOAP stack (by about 90%)."

A quote from another user trying to connect disparate systems:

"But I honestly cannot believe customers will continue to put up with the furball that AXIS2 has become. And if I am in a position to make a recommendation, I will recommend JAX-WS. It works."

Another endorsement of Metro's pluggable & extensible architecture is DCOM and Grizzly transports for Metro, reported by Jitu.

How is Metro helping you ?

In the heels of the Developer.COM Award for Metro for its interoperability capabilities here are two blog posts from Guy Burstein specifically describing how to do it: From SilverLight and From .NET Client. Metro interoperability is a key reason for the Metro Adoption. We have had a number of GlassFish customer wins that started on a desire to interoperate with Microsoft's stack. And it is always nice to see GlassFish mentioned at MSDN :-)

The GFv3 TP2 does not include the SOAP web services stack - Metro - (content) but it has all the required hooks and Metro is available from the v3 download center, as Bhakti explains in her Latest Note. Installation is straight-forward with the new UpdateCenter (ScreenShot). Try it out and let us know how it goes.

BTW, for those curious, you can poke to the IPS repositories through HTTP: windows, linux, mac, solaris SPARC, solaris x86

PS. As you can see, in addition to Metro, the GFv3 repository includes Grails support, Jersey (RESTful Web Services), jMaki/AJAX, and jRuby. Since TP2 already includes the Java Web Tier (Servlet+JSP+JSF) and JPA (EclipseLink), it is actually a very functional release - please share your experiences with it.

Over the past few months, Aravindan Ranganathan, Lakshman Abburi and Marina Sum have been working on a series of articles covering the new identity services functionality available now in OpenSSO and coming soon in Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0. This week sees the publication of part 3, covering retrieval of user attributes. One notable feature of the series is it's presentation of both SOAP/WSDL and REST patterns for accessing OpenSSO's identity services. Which do you use, and why?

The GlassFish Podcast has already provided some GlassFish audio, but this time Ed Ort brings us video with this interview of members of the Metro Web Services Security team. The interview, which was taped at the recent Hyderabad Sun Tech Days, starts off with interviewee background questions before it gets into the point-to-point vs. end-to-end security tradeoff (both of which Metro can do).

It then goes on to discuss the four main parts (specifications really) implemented today in Metro : WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConv (full list). The interview finally touches on the future beyond Metro 1.1 which is mainly about implementation of next versions of the specifications.

If nothing else, this is a good time to put a face on a name if you've been participation in the Metro mailing list or forum. If you're coming to JavaOne, you may want to write down this Microsoft/Sun session about interoperable web services.

You know the saying... "when Pigs Fly..."? Well, Clemen's Latest note starts: A flock of pigs has been doing aerobatics high up over Microsoft Campus in Redmond What he is referring is that he just checked in GlassFish and Metro into the latest Biztalk SDK! Neat! And he has some very nice words for the Metro team, as Arun highlights.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Alexis highlights another Microsofter, Stéphane, on another aspect of the same relationship: GF and NetBeans being available at Microsoft Technology Centers.

I think we may have a new mascot - the flying pig!

A new Tech Tip written by Jiandong Guo of the Application Server Web Services Security team was just posted. Read the tip and learn the basics of WS-SecureConversation. Also see an example that demonstrates how to enable secure conversations for a web service through the WS-SecureConversation support in Metro. You can find the tip here. Setting up the infrastructure can be tricky, so if you're getting started with WS-SecureConv, this is a good document to read. You can get to all the Tech Tips from this site or this blog.

The latest stable version of Metro (which ships as part of GlassFish v2) has been extensively tested with Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) version 3.0. The next version of .Net 3.5 is already out and the team is working hard to achieve the best possible interoperability with this new set of WS-* implementations.

Harold and Rama report on the most recent "plugfest" with Microsoft engineers. The work involves moving from some non-standard technologies (such as WS-ReliableMessaging 1.0 which is "just" a specification, not an open standard) to the OASIS version (OASIS WS-RM 1.1, dated July 2007) for better interoperability. The set of test scenarios is comprehensive and results very promising.

Check out Metro's roadmap here for an idea of when to expect stable releases. In the mean time, you can get the nightly builds.

Does GlassFish support REST or SOAP Web Services? Both! REST through Jersey and SOAP through Metro (Jersey will be included in a future Metro release, see Roadmap). Security is very important for SOAP Web Services and Jiandong has a set of notes describing how Metro supports WS-SX (OASIS Web Services Security Exchange). Check out the Overview, How to Issue SAML Tokens and a description of a Scenario based on WS-SX.

We recently realized that our "Web Services" page was pretty out of date. If you're new to Web Services in either Java EE 5 or in GlassFish and you are trying to make sense of Metro, JAX-WS, JAXB, WSIT, or Tango, the new version of that page is now available for you to find all about them.

You may also be interested in the list of Web Services Technical Articles and Tips. I find the Enterprise Tech Tips to be often very well written and straight to the point. Check them out and tell us what other topics you'd like to be covered.