Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Web Services Interop Plug-fest, Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA

Three of the WSO2 members including myself, went to Redmond, USA to participate in the MS interop-plugfest to ensure the interoperability in web services products. The event took place from 10th-July to 12th in the Microsoft's Redmond Campus. WSO2 had three products available in the bag for these testing. i.e. WSAS, WSF/C and WSF/PHP. Among many scenarios available, we selected a set of scenarios that are supported. Following is a brief description of how the testing went on for different categories of scenarios, and on areas we need to focus in the future.

Basic/Complex types:

One of the major areas we are lagging in my understanding is WSF/C's code
generation support. It is a tedious task to read WSDLs and write
clients. Especially in a time limited event like this. For some of the
WSDLs the code generated with adb support cannot be compiled. But thanks
to Milinda who was helping me a lot, we could fix these compilation
errors and test some ComplexDataType scenarios.

WS-Security:
The WS-Security scenarios associated with encryption and signature
inter-oped well with WCF/C. We had few issues in the SOAP body signing in
Rampart, but managed to fix it.

MTOM:
MTOM scenarios that WSF/C support worked well. Excluding MTOM with UTF-16 and with Security.

Relaible Messaging:
All most all the supported reliable messaging scenarios worked fine. This includes one-way and request-response(two way) scenarios.

Detailed results can be found here...

Further testing...
The biggest success we had in this event is to make MS to publish
their clients. So that we can interop with our services back in home. This would definitely allow us to debug our services and identify issues as early as possible. And also they've agreed to write a detailed document describing the usage.

Alright... In overall this is a fruitful event enabling us to identify many areas to be improved. Being the only web services framework implemented in C language, it is vital be interoperable with other products as much as possible. In fact the interoperability is a key factor of a successful web services product.
In Seattle we had a nice time. Good food, nice landscape and friendly people. One of the attractions in Seattle is this Space-needle. But coming back from US was a long trip, with delayed flights and scary bumps in turbulence. And I spent my first-ever airborne birth day above the pacific ocean.

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