It's official, we're open sourcing everything...

Today we got the official nod that our company is open sourcing all of our software, over four years of development. We are going to be focusing on selling consulting and bespoke integration work, which is basically what we did before.

The launch to open source won't happen till the 22nd of November, but in the lead up to that I am going to post some introductions to the different projects that will be made available. For now you can check out our company site at http://www.simulacramedia.com.

Polls, PCs and stuff

Well this weeks poll does not seem to be attracting people. Perhaps one one is interested enough in the subject, which does surprise me. WS-Security is the next implementable WS-* specification so I would have though it would at least be on people's radar. I might leave this poll up a little longer than the last one.

In other news, I am off tonight to pick up a couple of second hand machines from a friend. Still trying to plan out what setup I'm going to have, but I suspect that one of these will be my SCM/build server and the other a Tomcat/MySQL etc test server.

In doing all this, I'm definately going to be moving over to Linux on all but one of my machines. The one that isn't going will be for Windows testing and to run one bit of silly hardware that I can only run in Windows. It's looking likely that I'll go for Suse 9.1 thanless I can be pursuaded in another direction.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of Java/Web Services related postings the last couple of days. Lot's to do at work and still catching up from the codefest that was the weekend.

Web Service intermediaries in Axis

I've spent most of this weekend trying to work out how to best implement Web Service intermediaries in Apache Axis. Turns out this is quite hard.

While Axis is incredibly modularized, allowing you to plug-in functionality at many points, none of these are immediately useful for creating general intermediaries.

I did manage to find a way and got an ugly intermediary working for the GetQuote sample that comes with Axis. After that I began working on a more generalized framework for doing this. I have a basic framework that allows you to very simply implement a class, deploy part of the framework as an implementation of the service you want to act as an intermediary for, add a reference to your class in the WSDD entry for this service and that's it.

Your class then gets access to the request SOAPHeader and SOAPBody and the same on the way back through for the response. You can alter these as they pass.

The hardest part of this has been trying to come up with the requirements for the framework. No one appears to be doing any work with Web Services intermediaries and so I don't really know what people would want from the framework above and beyond.

One annoyance I have is that there does not appear to be an easy way to bounce between Axis' SOAPElement objects and XML DOM objects and back again. I am wondering if intermediary implementer would be okay with SOAPElements or would they rather work with pure XML DOM. I do suspect it would be the latter, as there are far more tools for assisting with that and it is the logical model of a SOAP service. However, I am concerned about the overhead in processing this.

I am a way off of releasing this, I need to add some more functionality, some examples (based on the Axis samples probably) and a really good from scratch example of a complex intermediary. I have a fairly good idea for this last part. Then more testing and some documentation.

If anyone has any ideas of features they would like to see in this let me know and I'll try and get them in, or at least architect around planned extensions.

Poll #2: What are you WS-Security plans?

So the WS-Security specification has been published for sometime now, we also have the WS-I Security Profile to encourage interoperability. Tool sets are begining to support the specification. All that's left is for people to actually begin using it.

This weeks poll asks that very question. However it would be fantastic if any of you who have or are implementing WS-Security would share some of those experiences. Please post any comments you have on this subject, they are always welcome.

Developer Support #3: WS Spec Landscape

I was browsing the Apache Axis Wiki and came across this page which is a list of links to Web Service specifications.

Apache Wiki: WebServicesSpecifications

Very similar to the one I posted a couple of weeks ago, just a bit easier to read.

Also, there is a link at the bottom of that page to a WS Specifications timeline which is really quite nice.

Web Services Timeline

While browsing around I also came across this article Constructing Reliable Web Services on the IBM site. This is most interesting as they talk about the WS-Reliability specification, which seems strange as IBM back the WS-ReliableMessaging specification along with Microsoft.

Amazon Web Services - Where might it head?

Amazon recently announced the update to their incredibly popular Web Services facilities.

"New Amazon Web Services Offerings Give Developers Unprecedented Access to Amazon Product Data and Technology, and First-Ever Access to Data Compiled by Alexa Internet"

This has got me thinking about what Amazon have done and where they may be heading with these. Now I need to preface this by saying that this is purely speculation on my behalf, I have no knowledge about this stuff. These ideas are just my thoughts based on what I would do in their situation.

So far they have never charged for access to these services, however the second part of this announcement, about opening up the Alexa Internet data, does say that this will be free during the beta phase only. This poses interesting questions about how they will charge for it and what services they will offer for that. So far Amazon have not offered anything in the way of service guarantees [Web services without warranties - LooselyCoupled.com].

What would you want to see from them if you have to pay to access the Web Services? Well for me it would be a Service Level Agreement for a start with some indication of how to best support this. Obviously if you read the site regularly you'll see the next part coming. I want Reliable Messaging of some sort. Obviously not many people would be able to implement this yet so you are talking about different endpoints with different facilities (one with RM one without) therefore Amazon should offer the one without RM with a lower SLA.

Moving forward though, what else might happen at Amazon. Web Services technologies are maturing and they should be beginning to think about what these changes will allow. In v3 they opened up the shopping cart through Web Services, really all that's left is the very end of the process with user services and card payments.

The technical problems restraining this were a lack of reliability (solved with WS-RM or WS-Reliability) and security (solved with WS-Security and WS-I: Security Profile). With these out of the way, they could move forward.

Obviously the card payments cannot be opened up to everyone so this suggests the split of Web Service users into Tier One and Tier Two. The current users and systems are what Tier Two would be, simple, open Web Services. Tier One users would be strategic partners who want to completely brand the entire shopping process. There would have to be serious business agreements in place, as well as SLAs. The experience that Amazon will be gaining through the paid for Alexa services will set them up for this.

This would be a major step forward for the widespread use of Web Services in major business mission critical infrastructures. This time next year possibly?

Developer Support #2: XSL References Links

I do a lot of work on building solutions around XSL and have a set of reference links that I live by so I thought I would pass these along. These reference sites are the ones that I always give to new developers or design partners starting out in XSL.

ZVON XSLT Reference

ZVON XSL:FO Reference

XSLT Questions and Answers

Standard XSLT extensions, useful until we all move to XSLT 2.0

Poll #1: Which IDE - results so far

I'm going to leave the poll up for the week, but the results so far look like this.

1) Eclipse/IntelliJ = 45%
2) JDeveloper = 4%
3) Netbeans/JBuilder/Websphere Studio = 2%

I'm glad Eclipse is right up there, makes our decision to go for it seem okay. I am truely interested in checking out the latest version of JDeveloper. Might take a copy home and give it a go there.

Anyway, I will update you with the final results before I close out the poll at the end of the week.

For next week I'm thinking about something to do with Web Services adoption. Thanks to everyone who expressed an opinion and I will set up some form of archive for these next week.

Apache proposal for WS-AtomicTransaction et al

There is a proposal
over on the Apache Web Services -WSFX Wikki for an implementation of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity.

From what I can tell this is from the same people who started the Sandesha project which is implementing WS-ReliableMessaging. They put an emphasis in their proposal to support interoperabillity. It would be good to see this get through, although I'm interested in reading the Architecture guide and the User guide more fully to see how easy this will be to use.

I guess the WS-* stack is moving forward whether you agree with it or not.

Which IDE do you use?

I was reading a review of Oracle JDeveloper 10g today, and I was shocked that I didn't know that this was being released for free. It would appear that I am that out of touch with such things. At work I am very happy with Eclipse, more so after the move to v3, but should I be.

I've heard great things about IntelliJ, but never tried it? So I would like to know what you think? I've added the poll you can see on the left, if you are going to select "Other" please leave a comment about which "Other" that is, or in fact a comment about one of the IDEs.