Reactivity Secures Web Services

Web services security software maker Reactivity announced XOS 4.1, the latest version of its XML operating system.

According to Reactivity CTO and co-founder John Lilly, XOS 4.1 runs on the Intel-based Reactivity Gateway 2400 Series appliance.

One of many performance enhancements to the OS include the addition of Gigabit Ethernet wirespeed performance, which cuts out some of the bottlenecks in application deployment.

New diagnostics features in XOS 4.1 include reports and tests that help clients test messages against their backend services so they can anticipate exactly what changes may happen.

The new software accelerates the performance across a Web services application and contains new schema validation technology for a more secure computing experience, reducing the overhead for doing schema to 10 percent. Schema bundling allows several different schema documents to be uploaded to the Reactivity Gateway and managed together.

Advanced SOAP header processing in 4.1 lets clients filter and transform SOAP headers. XOS 4.1 also offers full support for all four interoperability scenarios given in the Web Services Security profile, as well as support for SAML Token Profile and SAML audience restrictions.

Securing Web services is one of the ways Reactivity and its rivals Forum Systems and DataPower are trying to knock down the barriers to adoption of the lucrative distributed computing approach known as Web services .

Meanwhile, larger vendors Microsoft , IBM , BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems are doing their part to address the interoperability barriers with standards development.

According to IDC, the Web services software space will reach $3.2 billion by 2008, with vendors looking to carve out large pieces of the pie.