functions in its Web Services Toolkit for dynamic e-business (WSTK) 3.1,
now available for free, trial download on alphaWorks, (www.alphaWorks.ibm.com), the destination for IBM emerging technology.
These additions to the IBM WSTK provide an implementation of SOAP Security
Token and Digital Signature components of the WS-Security specification.
WS-Security is a new specification, co-developed by IBM and announced this
week, to help companies build secure, broadly interoperable Web services
applications. SOAP is an XML-based industry protocol for accessing Web
services in a platform- and language-independent manner.
The SOAP Security Token indicates the message sender’s properties – name,
identity, credentials and capabilities – and is passed with SOAP messages,
which helps identify the message sender to the Web service provider. This
modular technology is useful to Web service providers when they need to
support users with different authentication mechanisms. It also enables Web
services providers to incorporate additional security features to their Web
services applications over time.
“Security is a paramount issue for organizations that are planning to
deploy Web services in mission critical applications, and IBM is committed
to giving businesses early access to the technology necessary for building
secure Web services,” said Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards
strategy, IBM. “IBM’s WSTK 3.1 provides developers with the resources and
tools to start to address end-to-end Web services security, thereby helping
to drive application development and industry adoption.”
Continuing IBM’s commitment to open standards and cross-platform
interoperability, the WSTK 3.1 functions are based on open specifications
such as SOAP, WSDL, WS-Inspection and UDDI, and run on Linux, Windows XP
and Windows 2000 operating systems. IBM offers the most comprehensive Web
Services toolkit for Linux, the open source platform.
The WSTK 3.1 consolidates Web services-related technologies from various
IBM development and research labs and provides an implementation based on
non-proprietary interfaces that supports a variety of platforms. Other
tools and technologies now available in WSTK 3.1 include:
Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS)
This XML-based UDDI exploring engine provides application developers with
standard interfaces to perform complex searches in multiple UDDI
directories using a single query request. This allows users to more
efficiently retrieve information about businesses, their services and
service interfaces from one or more UDDI registries. By aggregating results
from multiple UDDI queries and processing the intersecting information from
those searches, BE4WS can help speed the development of Web services
applications.
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer is a browser-based tool
that generates an automatic user interface for helping users examine a WSDL
document to understand, discover and invoke available Web services. WSDL is
a protocol for a Web services to describe its capabilities. This will
enable users who do not have a working knowledge of WSDL and XML Schema to
easily make SOAP message requests to a Web service without having to write
code. This thereby simplifies the Web service testing process.
Web Services Management
This management technology illustrates an approach to managing Web services
by providing a Java Management Extensions (JMX) -based systems management
interface. JMX is the Java standard for Management APIs. A JMX M-Bean
Server that tracks Web services statistics — such as the number of times
the Web service is invoked, start/stop times, etc. — is instantiated
globally within the application server’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This
allows Web services statistics to be tracked across all installed Web
applications. By using the Web services management technology, a systems
administrator can gather Web services statistics to help manage their
company’s infrastructure and better understand how to distribute Web
services applications across several machines.
Buyer-Seller Web Services Demo
The Buyer-Seller demo combines Web services and standardized business
documents to show an end-to-end purchase of electronics components. It
illustrates the use of Web services technologies in a simulated
environment where a basic end-to-end business transaction is implemented.
Users can view the business interactions between the various components in
the demo through simple dashboards, or windows. The demo uses various
aspects of Web Services components — such as WSDL, WS-Inspection, UDDI,
AXIS, etc. — in a standards-based J2EE runtime environment.
About IBM
IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of
leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM software offers the widest
range of infrastructure software for all types of computing platforms,
allowing customers to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. The
fastest way to get more information about IBM software is through the IBM
home page at http://www.ibm.com/software.
