Web Services Interoperability Concerns

WebServicesInteroperabilityConcerns deal with a range of issues that need to be resolved for the realization of promises of WebServices.

As at early 2005, the foremost consideration is security related, including IdentityManagement schemes and privacy issues.

IdentityManagement

There are three forces at work.

MicrosoftCorporation has its DotNetPassport who is being displaced by federated solutions like ActiveDirectoryFederationServices (ADFS).
WebServicesFederation? standardization work done through WebServicesInteroperabilityOrganization (dominated by MicrosoftCorporation and IbmCorporation).
SunMicrosystems led LibertyAlliance, which IbmCorporation signed on in late 2004 as well, and which was rejected by MicrosoftCorporation.

WebServices wars

Microsoft said SoaIsPeace, peace the MicrosoftWay as they said (see MicrosoftIndigo) EnterpriseServiceBus based SOA is proprietary, and therefore have vendor lock-in concerns.

Their opposition is laying similar charges at Microsoft.

See also Top Ten ESB myths at http://www.ftponline.com/reports/vslivesf/2005/vanhuizen/

The source claim management capabilities of MicrosoftIndigo is not defined
more details at http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/48035_2.htm, where role of BizTalk is acknowledged, but still considered to be an incomplete solution.

Common standards do not ensure interoperability

An example being XmlSchema which is supposed to enable loosely coupled services to interact. However it is said to have numerous bugs, ambiguities, and incompletely implemented features that have not helped with heterogeneous environment service integration. (ref point 7 of article at http://www.builderau.com.au/architect/webservices/0,39024590,39193448,00.htm)

Resources

News and current events

May05 OasisOrganization reached agreements with WSI vendor consortium to incorporate WS-ReliableMessaging (WSRM) with its own WS-Reliability initiative.
- see http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20050510005209&newsLang=en
- Gartner analyst expects the two to merge eventually
- ZapThink? analyst felt the 2003 specs are now becoming important, due to the high volume traffic in the bloated XML.
Federated Identity Management Interoperability at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwebsrv/html/wsfedinterop.asp
Why Can't We Just Talk? at http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=48172&DE=1
Sun, Microsoft Breaking SOA Barriers at http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3467551
Key issues from Sun's perspective at http://www.oetrends.com/news.php?action=view_record&idnum=396
LibertyAlliance WSF 2.0 draft (Feb05) at http://www.projectliberty.org/press/details.php?item_id=101
UDDI 3 approval by OasisOrganization (Feb05) at http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_02_03_05.php

Older material

comparison between WS-Federation and Liberty approaches (Oct03) at https://www.projectliberty.org/resources/whitepapers/wsfed-liberty-overview-10-13-03.pdf
Microsoft Says No to Liberty Alliance at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200410/ai_n7181298
Microsoft on roadmap to using WebServicesSecurity (2004) at http://www.idevnews.com/IntegrationNews.asp?ID=108