Interop talk in portland, oct 3

[Steve Loughran <st...@iseran.com>]

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