The Spin Zone

News.com has a "Perspective" article in their "GUTS" (Get Up To Speed) section. Scotg has already given his thoughts on it in post called "Random Speculation". I thought I'd add some of my own.

Technical details about the demo that was shown haven't exactly been widely broadcast.

Here's the big picture.

The following WS-* specifications were used:

• WS-Addressing
  
• WS-Security with multiple token types
  
• WS-Trust
  
• WS-Federation, both Passive and Active profiles
  
• WS-Reliable Messaging
  
• WS-Transactions
  

There were 10 different nodes in play, ranging from a browser client, an application client, 3 Security Token Services, 4 WS-RM nodes, 2 database nodes, distributed transactions using WS-TX between both applications and transaction co-ordinators, plenty of .NET and Java code running on Windows and Linux machines. We layered WS-Security over WS-RM over WS-TX in the same SOAP messages (Secure, Reliable, Transacted).

There was even a fancy monitor application that graphically showed the message flows as they occured because we'd instrumented all the nodes using SOAP. Unfortunately, that wasn't shown at the event.

IBM implemented half of the nodes and Microsoft the other half. In the process of building the demo, both sides probably implemented all the nodes - the choice of how it was hooked up on stage was big company politics and marketing, not a technical limitation.

Despite all this, Bill Robbins says "That makes one think that the whole thing was thrown together rather quickly."

I wish that were true - this "non-event" took too much of my life this summer.

Posted by herveyw at October 14, 2003 11:21 PM