Thursday, May 27, 2004

WSE 2.0 Released! 

Although this isn't strictly related to BizTalk (watch this space though!), it's a significant release with regards to security in web services (WS-Security is implemented to the OASIS 2004 standard) and a little thing called SOAP Messaging.

SOAP Messaging allows us to move closer to the SOA goal of defining web services that can be asynchronous, loosely coupled and interact using XML based messaging; rather than RPC over HTTP (current .NET web services implementation). Ok, I know that RPC over HTTP is effectively SOAP-RPC and is implemented as an XML message, but there is an important difference there. SOAP-RPC defines a format(s) for representing a method call, its parameters and their datatypes. SOAP Messaging is more lightweight in that the body of the SOAP message is simply an XML document that can be anything - say, an invoice. There is no SOAP-RPC encoding involved. In an SOA world, the XML messages are defined using schema and the behaviour of the web service as contract, and WSE 2.0 gets us on that road.

Therefore, in my view, WSE 2.0 becomes quite a powerful platform for building web services today in anticipation of Indigo and the nirvana of an SOA future...

# posted by Paul @ 4:44 PM |

About the Author

You may be wondering who I am (or may not!), but I've been in the industry 16+ years working on a variety of systems from IBM mainframes as a CICS systems programmer, to developing on Unix and Windows based systems. At the moment, I'm currently working for a Microsoft Gold Partner in the UK called Solidsoft who specialise in systems integration using BizTalk Server. My position is generally dictated by what I'm doing, but normally as a solutions architect/consultant helping clients with their integration projects involving, yes you guessed it: BizTalk Server.

Disclaimer: all the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of Solidsoft Ltd or indeed any other company.