User Experience of WSIT

Attendees:
Mark Basler, Harold Carr, Siraj Ghaffar, Shing Wai Chan, Vince Kraemer, Nazrul Islam

Summary:

  • Java Web Services group from Sun is working with Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to deliver the next generation web services technologies with interoperability between the two products.
  • WSIT is the official name. Project Tango is the code name used within Sun.
  • We are implementing a number of ws-* specifications (see slide 20).
  • Currently we are only testing with WCF.
  • WSIT featrue set:
    • Bootstrapping Communication
      • Use wsimport or svcutil in WCF. Registry is not mentioned. (slide 7)
    • Optimizing Communication
      • Wire format optimization (MTOM/XOP)
      • Security optimization (WS-SecureConversation)- Use of shared context and derived keys improves security
    • Enabling Reliability
      • Recovery from messages lost or misordered in transit
    • Enabling Atomic Transactions
      • WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransactions support
      • All operations in TX boundary succeed or rollback
    • Securing Communication
      • WS-Security and WS-Trust support
      • End-to-end by encrypting/signing message before transport
      • Establish and broker trust relationships
  • TCP protocol support is not inter-operable. It can be used to improve performance when only Sun products are being used (slide 11).
  • SMTP is used to illustrate that the architecture is pluggable.
  • No runtime APIs are exposed to the developers!
    • Supply a wsit config file on the server side and client side to configure the policy. (slide 23)
    • The config file use WSDL format.
    • A question was asked if the client side config file can be automatically generated based on the server side service. For non-NetBeans users, this seems to be a problem.
  • WSIT has a NetBeans plugin (slide 24). This will be part of Application Server plugin when we ship 9.1.
    • No one has requested an eclipse plugin in the WSIT forum yet.
  • WSIT is not exposed in the Admin GUI or CLI. This will be addressed in the next release of Application Server.
    • When wsit-*.xml config file is changed, the server requires a restart. No dynamic reconfig support exist.
    • User must undeploy the application or client has the get the artifacts again. What this means is changing configuration for WSIT features in production will be a big deal.

Open Issues:

  • Need an Eclipse plugin for WSIT - ?
  • Allow users to manage WSIT configuration/policies via Admin GUI and CLI - Anissa Lam, Satish Viswanatham, Harold Carr, Jane Young
  • Make it easy to manage WSIT configuration in production. Remove the need to undeploy the application for changing wsit configuration - Harold.