Victory declared on WS-*

I have been hearing a lot of feedback from customers asking for more transparency on which specs are complete and which ones we expect to see more churn on.  We started a web-site to help disseminate more information on the workshops that Microsoft and our collective Industry partners have been holding to present the work in the WS-* protocols specifications, gather feedback, and collaborate on interoperability.  The next workshop will be an interop workshop for Reliable Messaging. The workshops timeline can help folks track the progress of the specifications.

 

Updates on the specs

WS-Security is already deployed in numerous production systems.  OASIS is close to recommendation on the WS-Security spec.  I feel that WS-Security is a great example of how specifications should be designed.  Even before the OASIS ratification will occur, WS-Security has already been widely adopted by customers and numerous vertical standards bodies are investigating it as a foundation for Web services security.   I have been excited to see case studies coming across my desk that demonstrate ROI implementing WS-Security in ways I never even thought about.  Simply removing the administration headache of dealing with point to point ssl connections has lowered complexity for many of our customers.  Customers love the simplicity of the WSE programming model and are continuing to choose .NET as the development platform of choice for Web services development.  This is reflected by the recent update to the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

 

Last week, there was a revision made to the WS-Transaction specification framework (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction).  Also, Policy was updated as a result of obtaining feedback from the spec workshops and from implementation experience. It is pretty exciting to see how much traction WS-* has and how quickly the industry is coming together to make interoperability a reality.

 

There is a new whitepaper on the Secure, Reliable, and Transacted Web services protocols.

 

The specs are done

Bill Gates and an IBM executive got on stage this week in New York .  The coverage on the event was amazing.  They declared victory on the WS-* protocols for providing secure, reliable, transacted Web services communication.  Press Coverage included WSJ, NY Times, Forrester Research, Associated Press, InformationWeek, InfoWorld, CRN, (about 20 more pieces not listed)

Both Microsoft and IBM also recommitted to making the protocols available to customers royalty free. When asked if he really meant it, Gates laughed, and confirmed he won't back off the promise. "I can't believe I said that"

 

What was demoed?  Read the whitepaper for the full scenario.  A real world supply chain scenario where a user logs into a partner company to place an order and the order is processed via secure, reliable, transacted Web services communication to the backend systems.  They showed off how the WS-* protocols can be composed to provide messages that are secure, reliable, transacted, and/or any combination of these three.  They even unplugged a network cable to show the reliable messaging in action.  There was a tablet, smart clients, web browsers, trust issuing services, transaction servers, reliable messaging infrastructure, multiple backend databases, multiple simulated companies, and each endpoint was running either a .NET or WebSphere backbone.

Kudos to Keith Ballinger , Hervey Wilson , and the entire Web Services Enhancements team for building not only an awesome product, but an infrastructure that can support the type of extremely complex business scenario that was demonstrated at this event.

 

Other Tidbits

 

Rich Salz wrote an article on the Applied XML Dev Con we hosted earlier this year.

 

Scott Short posted his code for his security talk that he gave at the MS Technical Briefing at XML Web services one.

 

Anybody checked out the following WS-Federation demo?

 

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