MS, Intel Shepherd New Web Services Spec
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A host of companies led by Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Intel has revised and released a specification for making sure computer systems have a common way to communicate.
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With open-source software being formally introduced Monday, WSO2 seeks to bridge the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails Web framework with the SOA and Web services spaces.The company is set to debut WSO2 WSF/Ruby (Web Services Framework for Ruby) 1.0, providing a Ruby extension to support the Web Services WS-* stack. Ruby developers can incorporate security and reliable messaging capabilities needed for trusted, enterprise-class SOAP-based Web services, WSO2 said. But the product also supports the alternative REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services."Ruby, as you know, has become a very popular language the last few years, and what we are enabling is for Ruby to become part of an enterprise SOA architecture," WSO Chairman/CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana said.While Ruby has been popular in the Web 2.0 realm, sometimes it needs to talk to legacy architectures, he said. With the new framework, developers could build a Web application using Ruby and then hook into enterprise infrastructures, such as JMS (Java Message Service) queues. For example, a Web site might be built with Ruby that then needs to link to an order fulfillment system based on an IBM mainframe or minicomputer, Weerawarana said.With the December release of Ruby on Rails 2.0, the builders of Rails swapped out a SOAP library and replaced it with REST capabilities. In doing this, David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of Rails, stressed that that SOAP and its attendant WS-* stack had become too complex.But Weerawarana stressed REST may not always be sufficient. "[The REST preference] is a perfectly fine position to take if you don't need any kind of these security and reliability infrastructure [capabilities]," he said. WSO2's framework would replace the SOAP capabilities removed in Rails 2.0, he said.Weerawarana's stance was seconded by a user of the company's products, Stefan Tilkov, CEO of infoQ, a consulting firm near Dusseldorf, Germany. While saying he likes Rails because it picks and chooses technologies, such as opting for REST over SOAP, Tilkov said businesses may not be ready to welcome Rails and the lesser known REST Web services at the same time, he said."Sometimes, you have to decide whether you want to fight all of the possible battles at once. Trying to introduce both Rails and [REST] at the same to a company can really be a challenge," he said. WSO2 is providing WS-* and SOAP capabilities for Rails, Tilkov stressed.Still, Tilkov likes REST. "I'm a very big REST fan, and I [advocate] the use of REST whenever I can," he said.WSF/Ruby 1.0 binds WSO2's Web Services Framework for C into Ruby to provide an extension based on three Apache projects. These include: Axis 2C, which is a Web services runtime to support REST and SOA; Sandesha/C, supporting WS-Reliable Messaging; and Rampart/C, for WS-Security capabilities.Also, WSF/Ruby 1.0 uses Ruby on Rails as its deployment model for providing services.Client and service APIs are offered. Support is featured for SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2. The software is interoperable with Microsoft .Net, the WS02 Web Services Application Server, and other J2EE implementations. SOAP Message Transmission Optmization and WS-Addressing capabilities are included as well.Downloadable here, WSF/Ruby 1.0 is offered under the Apache License 2.0. While it is free, WS02 does sell development and production services as well as training for it. Production support prices start at $2,000, while development support begins at $2,500 for 10 hours. Training costs $400 per day per person with a minimum of five persons required.WSO2's long-term strategy includes allowing scripting languages like Ruby, Perl, and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) to participate in an enterprise SOA.
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Two months after the announcement of WS-Addressing, Microsoft has again joined Sun and other industry leaders including AMD, Dell and Intel in publishing the Web Services Management specification. WS-Management provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information.
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(InfoWorld) - Later this year, Intel will help server network interfaces take advantage of the major recent advances in datacenters: multiprocessor systems, multicore processors, and virtualization. The company unveiled at Cisco Systems' Networkers user conference a pair of chips for server network cards or motherboards. The Intel 82598 10-Gigabit Ethernet Controller is set for production in September, and the 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller is shipping now to system and component vendors. The company did not disclose pricing. New and emerging technologies are boosting datacenter processing power and helping enterprises take advantage of the systems they've invested in, but network connections are still catching up. They have become the bottlenecks of new, faster datacenters, said Sunil Ahluwalia, a product line manager in Intel's LAN access division. The chips introduced Monday include multiple queues, virtualization capability, packet prioritization, and new storage networking features to break that bottleneck. For example, until now, the chips Intel makes to handle communication between servers and storage or the LAN have essentially just had one path in and out of the system. Sorting out which packet goes to which processor or core, for example, has been a job for the CPU itself, and a strenuous one, Ahluwalia said. It can take all of the CPU's processing power at times. The new chips have multiple queues and software for placing packets in those queues. With 32 transmitting and 64 receiving queues per port, the 10-Gigabit chip can move packets in and out of all the server's processors and cores, balancing the workload and taking advantage of the server's power, Ahluwalia said. The Gigabit Ethernet chip has four transmitting and receiving queues per port. Using the queuing system, the chips can also give certain packets priority so thatÂ important functions can take place quickly over the network. With the chips, Intel also introduced Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) to allocate packets to different virtual machines on a server. For this feature to work, virtualization software vendors will have to make their softwareÂ cooperate with VMDQ. Intel is working on this with VMWare, XenSource, and Microsoft, though it does not expect those vendors to have compatibility in place by September, said Steve Schultz, an Intel product marketing manager. In addition, the controller chips can work natively with iSCSI storage networks. The 10-Gigabit card also has some features designed for use with emerging FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) technology, Ahluwalia said. An FCoE standard is still being worked out, and the chips don't have FCoE itself, Intel said. With the 10-Gigabit controller, Intel upgrades from a PCI-X bus to the faster PCI Express bus for the first time on a 10-Gigabit Ethernet product. With the new performance features to offload tasks from server CPUs, the chip will be able to achieve full 10Gbps throughput while taking up on 10 percent of CPU cycles, Ahluwalia said.
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(InfoWorld) - WSO2 is upgrading its open source application server, which has been centered on Web services rather than being of the usual Java variety most common in this product space. Featured in version 2.0 of the companyâs WSAS (Web Services Application Server) are integration with the Eclipse IDE and capabilities for data services and clustering. The product is available next week and will be officially unveiled on July 16. Formerly called Tungsten, WSAS is a service-hosting environment. It offers a standard Web services runtime deployable with Java application servers from vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, and JBoss without requiring vendor-specific coding, said Sanjiva Weearawarana, chairman of Sri Lanka-based WSO2. "If you use our runtime, it gives you a consistent, fully open source runtime that runs across all those [platforms] and gives you a consistent programming model," Weearawarana said. WSAS has been available both as a stand-alone application and for hosting within Java servers and Apache Tomcat servlet containers. Applications have included linking legacy systems to Web services as well as workflow, business process management, and data integration. Eclipse integration in version 2.0 means the full application server can be run within the IDE as opposed to having it outside of Eclipse. This makes testing of classes easier. Data services capabilities in the release enable provision of services interfaces to relational data without having to write code. This can be done using SQL queries, mappings, and wizard capabilities. WSO2 Application Server is differentiated by being built from the ground up for Web services and SOA, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. "What's most notable in version 2.0 is the Eclipse integration, better clustering and high availability, support for EJB services, better security, and data services. Perhaps the most notable of these improvements are the data services, which help service-enable relational data from a variety of heterogeneous sources," Bloomberg said. "We're finding that dealing with heterogeneous data issues is one of the technical stumbling blocks for many SOA implementations, and WSAS should help many enterprises address those issues," Bloomberg said. Clustering and high-availability boosts performance and uptime for WSAS 2.0. The application server can be clustered across any number of systems, Weearawarana said. To prevent denial of service attacks, an access throttling capability regulates access to services. To improve security, XKMS (XML Key Management Specification) key management is included. Support for the WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Policy and WS-SecureConversation specifications also is featured. Legacy Enterprise JavaBeans can be redeployed as Web services in the application server. An example could be an EJB that manages a business account. Backward compatibility is provided between WSAS 2.0 and the Apache Axis 1.0 Web services runtime. Services written in Axis 1.0 can be deployed with WSAS 2.0 and leverage new Web services protocols supported by WSAS, such as WS-ReliableMessaging or WS-Policy. WSO2 sells related support services for WSAS 2.0. The 1.0 version of WSAS, introduced a year ago, has been downloaded about 10,000 times, Weearawarana said.
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Microsoft will come out with a special version of Windows next year for clusters, but it won&#39;t run on Intel&#39;s most powerful server chip, at least for now.
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New dual-core processors will make conventional software licensing models obsolete. What's next?
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A forthcoming version of Windows Server is designed for building supercomputers from clusters of PCs.
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Joseph Chiusano, Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, provides an overview of the newly released OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) standard and discusses the criticality of Web Services reliability for service-oriented architectures.
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Released to manufacturing Microsoft this morning released Service Pack 1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturers.â¦
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Superfast servers with Intel's new quad-core Xeon 5300 processor coming in January.
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The industryâs latest allies -- Microsoft and Sun -- have supported the publication of Web Services Management (WS-Management), a Web services specification that provides a common way for enterprises to access and exchange management information across
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Microsoft has announced the imminent availability of Host Integration Server 2004 in a bid to compete with IBM&#39;s WebSphere.
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New Web services technologies announced Monday will help developers build money-making applications and use existing mainframe technology to create and deploy new Web services.
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Opera CTO H&#229;kon Wium Lie asks how seriously Microsoft's Web browser will support an upcoming Web standards test.
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(InfoWorld) - Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures)Â this week,Â MicrosoftÂ  unveiled new guidelines for partners create an enterprise service bus (ESB). Usually, BEA Systems and IBM beat the SOA drum the loudest, but Microsoft renamed its Business Process and Integration Conference for BizTalk partners "SOA and Business Process Conference" with the aim demonstrate that it, too, has a plan for helping customers build SOAs. Microsoft has had itsÂ business process integration product BizTalk since 2000, but it has not been as vocal as competitors BEA and IBM in discussing a comprehensive SOA strategy. SOA is the next generation of enterprise software architectures, in which applications and services within the IT system are loosely coupled and able to be integrated piecemeal to form custom, or "composite," applications from various components across the enterprise. Microsoft worked with partner Neudesic to provide sample code and documentation for using BizTalk Server to build an ESB, which Microsoft defines as a set of capabilities -- such as mediation, transformation and integration -- for connecting business processes and services throughout the organization, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management. The company also unveiled a new adapter for Extensible Markup Language-based BizTalk that enables customers to connect the product more easily to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. The technology, called the BizTalk Adapter for Host Systems, is based on technologies available in Microsoft's Host Integration Server product, which the company has had for some time, Martin said. John Devadoss, a Microsoft director of architecture, said it is still finding a lot of misconceptions about SOAs among its customers, who think they have to rearchitect their entire software infrastructure "from the top down" to build SOAs. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that SOAs are more successful if there is a "real-world business driver" behind the architecture, he said. "In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have joined forces on Web Services Management, a new specification that promises to simplify systems management.