Hi all, Axis users in the Portland (Oregon, not Dorset) area may be interested in a little talk I'm giving this thursday on the subject of Web Service Interoperability. Its organised by the Portland .NET users goup, so I'm focusing on .NET as the server, but Axis will be the stress test for the client. I'll try and be entertaining and there will be free pizza, too. All welcome, even the people who heckle from the back.
http://www.padnug.org/padnug/WebServicesSIG.aspx#meetings http://cpd.ogi.edu/class.asp?n=03-WSS-1003 The Wondrous Curse of Interoperability Steve Loughran, HP Labs If the strength of SOAP is that it is platform and language agnostic, its weakness is that there is almost no guarantee that programs written with different SOAP implementations will be able to work with a web service of any complexity. I will explore the fundamental reasons why "Interop" is such an issue, and look at the problems associated with simple datatypes, complex datatypes, exceptions, session management and binary data. I will then show how a knowledge of the potential problems can be backed up by a development process that tests for interoperability as part of the build process, demonstrating how Apache Ant and Axis can be used to create and run interoperability tests for .NET web services. I will also show how Ant and the Junit framework can be used for deployment tests of a service, tests that validate the health of the system. Together these techniques act as the basis for an automated web service deployment and test process. -Steve
