Ready for Web Services? Take the Interop Test

Developers: Start your Web Services interoperability testing.

The Web Services Interoperability Organization has released its (WS-I) Basic Profile for interoperability among different Web services .

The Web Service Communication Monitor and the Web Service Profile Analyzer testing tools are now available in C# and Java , according to a WS-I spokesperson.

WS-I said the tools will help developers test for compliance of the Basic Profile, announced last August. The tools are the final component of the WS-I Basic Profile deliverables package.

The Basic Profile is the Web services roadmap for the WS-I, a group whose goal is to promote interoperability in Web services. Members include Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and several other high-profile software makers or organizations with vested interests in Web services.

Tom Glover, president and chairman of WS-I, and an IBM senior program
director of standards, said the tools will help developers ensure that their Web services meet the WS-I interoperability criteria and “will provide customers with the confidence they need to successfully deploy Web services.”

The delivery of the tools, available at the WS-I site now paves the way for WS-I to focus on a glaring problem in Web services distribution: security. The group said it is currently working to develop interoperability guidelines to address attachments and Web services security.

The Basic Security Profile Working Group expects to publish a draft of the Basic Security Profile, which will profile the WS-Security spec from OASIS, early next quarter.

Basic Profile includes guidelines on how to make specifications work together within Web services functions, whose goal is to allow applications to communicate with one another. Web services are considered to be the next great driver of online commerce, but several problem areas, including interoperability, security and management remain unsolved.

The profile includes SOAP 1.1 for messaging, WSDL 1.1
for description, UDDI for listing and discovery of other partners’ directories, XML 1.0 as the mark-up language and XML Schema. .

The WS-I created the two tools to test interoperability of the components of the basic profile. The Web Service Communication Monitor snares messages exchanged with Web services, and stores them for analysis by the Web Service Profile Analyzer, which evaluates the messages and validates the description and registration artifacts of the Web service.

These artifacts include the WSDL document that describes the Web service, the XML schema files that describe the data types used in the WSDL service definition, and the UDDI registration entries.

The Analyzer produces a report about whether a Web service is
interoperable with the pieces of the Basic Profile. The report details any failures.