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It takes two to 'TANGO'

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CIOL Bureau
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Use of Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture

(SOA) has changed the way software is being developed and used. Graduating from the object oriented style of programming, programmers are making use of .Net and Java frameworks to develop web based services that can be deployed on a server and can be consumed from remote locations.

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Web services use open, XML-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data with calling clients.

Java Platform, Enterprise edition (Java EE) provides a set of APIs and tools needed to create and deploy interoperable Web services and clients. Microsoft's

Windows Communication

Foundation
, WCF (previously codenamed 'Indigo') is a unified framework for building secure, reliable, transacted Web services applications that interoperate with applications built on other platforms and integrate with the applications built using other .NET technologies.

Project Tango is Sun Microsystems initiative that brings Sun engineers working on Java Web Services together with their counterparts at Microsoft who work on WCF to ensure interoperability of enterprise features, such as security, reliable messaging, and atomic transactions. Under the project, plugfests are held where Sun and Microsoft engineers work together to test implementations.

This project uses Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) specification and JAXB as a foundation to build plugins to provide web services features such as bootstrapping communication, optimizing communication, reliable messaging, atomic transactions, security and trust.

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Bootstrapping Communication



For consuming a Web service, one needs to get the URL of that service and then build the client-side artifacts to communicate with it. Project Tango uses

wsimport to receive the metadata describing the service and automatically creates consumer side proxies to communicate with the service, reducing developer's headache.

Using the latest version of JAX-WS's wsimport, metadata from a WCF-based service can be obtained through WS-Transfer and WS-MetadataExchange. All this is handled by wsimport, under the cover using specifications agreed upon by Sun and Microsoft.





Optimizing Communication



Project Tango provides the MTOM and XOP (built into the underlying JAX-WS platform) specifications to optimize the wire format of SOAP messages and the WS-SecureConversation specification for optimizing security between the providers and consumers of Web services. These specifications enable optimizations that work with WCF-based consumers and providers, as well. This can be achieved by simply clicking a checkbox option provided by the Project Tango module for

NetBeans IDE.



Enabling Reliability



Messages that get disordered or lost in transit can lead to system failures, in such an instance the recovery is handled automatically by the underlying system without any outside interaction. Interoperable reliability, achieved by implementing the WS-ReliableMessaging specification, under Project tango it is provided as a checkbox option in a reliability panel in NetBeans IDE.

Enabling Atomic Transactions

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Atomic transactions ensure the success of all operations within a transaction boundary. Project Tango enables transactional support for web services, interoperable atomic transactions are enabled by implementing the WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransactions specifications.

Securing Communication

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Project Tango implements the WS-Security specification to provide interoperable message content integrity and confidentiality. The project provides an implementation of the WS-Trust specification as a means for issuing, renewing, and validating security tokens used by WS-Security, and to establish and broker trust relationships.

WSIT Components



At the recently concluded JavaOne 2006 conference, one of the leading events for Java technology developers Sun released Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT), an open-source implementation of next generation Web services technologies that deliver interoperability between Java EE and .Net to help build, deploy, and maintain Composite Applications for Service Oriented Architecture.

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Built upon JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services), this implementation will be made available as the "Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT)" and is focused on four main categories: Messaging, Metadata, Security, and Quality-of-Service (QoS).

WSIT has been tested extensively with Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and provides a reliable way for Java technology-based applications to integrate and interoperate with the .Net framework - above and beyond the WS-I Basic Profiles. As part of Sun's ongoing commitment to improving interoperability with Microsoft products, Sun also announced plans to support WSIT in the next version of the Sun Java System Application Server.

A developer using WSIT products from Project Tango does not require knowledge of these specifications nor to even be aware of their existence. The specifications are design documents that enable Project Tango and WCF to interoperate by implementing those specifications.

Sun and Microsoft engineers closely collaborate to help ensure that implementations of WCF- based services and Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) based services will be interoperable, allowing a single business process design to run seamlessly across the Java platform and the .NET framework.

To read more about Project Tango, click

here
.

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