Microsoft gives go-ahead to open-source Web services
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Company won't assert patents related to 35 Web services specs--a move designed to ease developers' legal concerns.
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Microsoft released on Tuesday a preview version of new tools intended to make it easier for companies to create custom Web applications.
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The upcoming version of the open-source Web browser will fit right in with Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X. Linux is another matter entirely.
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Ziff Davis - Microsoft is reaching out further to the open-source community with offers of joint development and testing, but some wonder about the company's sincerity.
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Blog: It's true that open-source applications and infrastructure don't necessarily play well together today, as Microsoft suggests.  But it's also true that more than enough integration is in place for current market demand.
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Microsoft plans on Tuesday to unveil what could be an industry-changing effort in application modeling and SOA with its "Oslo" project, which could significantly change the equation in the Windows application deployment space.Part of Oslo involves delivering a unified platform integrating services and modeling, Microsoft said. But instead of models describing the application, models are the applications themselves.Oslo is a codename for a set of technical investments that will be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft's platform products, said Steven Martin, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems division. These products include Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services, and the .Net Framework. Beta releases of Oslo technology are due in 2008."Oslo is a set of technologies that we think will help take model-driven design mainstream," Martin said.With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall.Release dates of Oslo-driven products have not been set. "This will make existing products we have better. Oslo doesn't have any new products. It's being injected into existing projects," Martin said.The products include:* Microsoft .Net Framework "4," which will further enable model-driven development within the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services platform and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).* Visual Studio "10," to follow the upcoming Visual 2008 package. Version 10 focuses on application lifecycle management with tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.* BizTalk Server "6," which will continue to offer technology for distributed SOA and BPM and include capabilities for composite applications.* BizTalk Services "1," which provides BizTalk capabilities within the cloud, will feature Web-based services for hosting composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Advanced messaging, identity, and workflow will be featured.* Metadata repositories will be aligned across server and tools products, including System Center "5," Visual Studio "10," and BizTalk Server "6." Each will utilize repository technology for managing, versioning, and deployment models."System Center will be able to grab an application from the repository and deploy it easily without any intermediate steps," said Martin. Also, Microsoft anticipates that WCF and WWF will collapse into a single technology, he said.Analysts at Gartner called Oslo "ambitious.""It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.Featured in Oslo are three fundamental components: a modeling environment, a business process server, including a significant evolution of BizTalk Server, and a new deployment model, Pezzini said.Oslo makes sense on paper, he said. "So far, there are only ideas and plans and prototypes, etc., so we have to see," said Pezzini.He added that he senses Oslo is mostly focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics applications as work as enterprise applications via a SaaS (software as a service) model.Microsoft will need industry backing for Oslo to succeed, said analyst Nick Gall, vice president at Gartner."It's doubtful that it could really have the kind of major impact that I'm sure Microsoft and all of us would like to see unless they get the industry behind the approach," Gall said. Microsoft said it is evaluating whether to submit Oslo to an industry standards body and whether to seek industry-wide use of Oslo.SOA is related to Oslo because a services piece is offered, in which tooling and integration are improved with the .Net Framework. Also, there will be better connectivity to BizTalk Services, which provides Web-based services for messaging, identity, and workflow.Modeling, meanwhile, is important to application development, said Martin. Microsoft sees stumbling blocks with modeling as it is now: that modeling represents the application or business logic at a specific time, thus providing only a snapshot, and that models exist in isolation."Anytime you're looking at a model, you're only looking at a piece of the application because each of those models is separate," Martin said.Solving these problems involves taking modeling mainstream, he said. "Today, modeling is really only something that a select group of users and a select group of companies can do," said Martin.Whether a user is designing, developing, or deploying applications, Oslo "will simplify your job," Martin stressed.Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter. But UML is a great example of a modeling language and Microsoft wants to unify its approach to modeling in general, Martin said.A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository. Microsoft's modeling language provides a way to unify existing modeling languages, similar to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime for application development.Oslo expands beyond UML to cover deployment and management, which UML does not address, Pezzini said.Key to Microsoft's effort is a unified metadata repository. Users get a view of a model being pulled out of this repository, Martin said. Deployment and policy information, workflow, and rules are maintained in one location, to prevent loss of data useful when deploying and managing an application or writing business rules against it."We think this will allow a much broader set of users to collaborate on applications," Martin said. "We think the process of building applications will be more efficient when anybody can see the application holistically."If Microsoft is successful with its plan to have application components automatically deployed based on models in the repository, it will be "a very huge benefit for the IT operations," said Pezzini.Microsoft is making available tools and guidance to take advantage of "real-world SOA." Featured are SOA resources from Microsoft and industry partners. Meanwhile, the new Microsoft SOA and Business Process Solution Center offers resources such as patterns and practices based on customer implementations.Microsoft's approach to SOA is to start out with a business problem and build services. The company will continue to work with partners such as AmberPoint and SOA Software to help round out SOA offerings, said Martin.Also at the conference, Microsoft plans to demonstrate an upcoming technology preview of BizTalk Services, with additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards, and workflow in the cloud.The Oslo vision will be the subject of a keynote by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday morning. Microsoft's SOA strategy will be covered in the presentation.
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GT Software next week will formally unveil its platform for outfitting mainframe applications with Web services functionality and linking legacy data into SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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The era of monolithic deployments of software releases is nearing an end, and Microsoft will participate in the trend toward more flexible updates, the research firm said.
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Microsoft this month is moving forward with the developer implementation of its anti-spam Sender ID framework, but open-source advocates and mail vendors doubt whether the software giant&#39;s new proposed license meets open-source requirements.
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WSO2 will debut its open-source WSO2 Registry on Monday, providing registry and repository services for SOA.Featuring SOA governance and Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities, WSO2 Registry offers a repository for storing information and a registry for locating it. A Web-based interface is included along with Web 2.0 features like tags, ratings, and comments systems. Users can store and manage enterprise metadata in a wiki-style model."It?s a registry and repository product, so it basically organizes and lets you store in a versioned and REST-compatible way all the [SOA metadata] that happens to be in your enterprise," said Glen Daniels, director of Java platforms at WSO2. Metadata can include service descriptions, XML schemas, and configuration data.The company follows MuleSource in announcing an open-source registry and repository for SOA. But don't expect open-source registry/repository products to displace commercial products, one analyst said."Commercial registry/repository products support significantly more capabilities than the open-source products," said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. "Organizations that are looking for solutions that can facilitate a comprehensive governance program will find the commercial products to be much more helpful than the open-source ones. The open-source solutions will put a lot of price pressure on the commercial products, though.""[WSO Registry is] a simple, lightweight registry and repository product," Manes said. "It provides a means to manage SOA artifacts (e.g., WSDLs and schemas) and provides rudimentary lifecycle management of these artifacts."Web 2.0 capabilities, such as tagging and commenting, helps link communities to SOA, Daniels stressed. This improves communication among team members and across the enterprise, WSO2 said. "We're trying to build middleware that sort of helps out not only with the storing of the technical information but helps out with the fostering of these community connections that actually makes SOA go," he said.WSO2 views its Web 2.0 capabilities as a differentiator between the rival MuleSouce platform.WSO2's structured repository supports XML and SOA metadata formats along with arbitrary data, such as Microsoft Office documents, images, files, and text formats. A catalog of enterprise information can be built that includes services, service descriptions, employee data, and ongoing projects.Also, the product can be deployed in several usage scenarios, including being embedded in a Java application that needs to store resources. Also, a REST-style (Representational State Transfer) Web API allows the product to be used remotely from any language including Java, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), C++, and JavaScript.A Web API in the product is built on Atom and AtomPub protocols enabling a feed reader, such as Google reader, to browse registry contents. An AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interface is featured as well, allowing the registry to be used as a Web application. The product can be used with its embedded database or use an existing database, such as MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server.Other features include:* A single model of dependency chains, helping organizations understand the implications of changing a service * Deployment in any Java servlet container, such as JBoss or Apache Tomcat * Configurable security, including the ability to work with existing LDAP or Acegi directories. * Resource/collection versioning for browsing previous versions of resources or collections * Links to workflow systems or Web applications to integrate with governance and management processes * Searchable audit logs and search options, such as the ability to search based on tags * A client API to integrate with code that does not use HTTP to obtain configuration or other metadata.WSO2 Registry is available for download Monday and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. WSO2 offers service and support options.
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Microsoft has previewed &quot;Whitehorse,&quot; a set of visual design tools intended to support the design and validation of Web services-based applications.
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The open-source development tools consortium fills out its projects for Ajax-style Web development.
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If Linux Standard Base 2.0 becomes the de facto guideline for companies working on open-source technologies, Microsoft may face more competition.
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Microsoft announced Monday that it had completed its Windows Home Server (WHS) software and released the code to its OEM partners, just six months after Redmond unveiled the project.
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Microsoft, Sun and a trio of other leading hardware vendors today published the WS-Management specification, which spells out how data centers can use Web services
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The tools, part of an upcoming Visual Studio update, are focused on making it easier to create customized Web applications.
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Earlier than scheduled, Microsoft Corp. has gone public with its announcement of its third open-source code contribution to SourceForge.