Webservile.com: SOAP Spec Authored During Beer Bust: “Don Box revealed today that the so called Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) was the outcome of a drinking session that got out of control. SOAP is now supported by vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun and is seen as one of the technological lynch pin of the Web Services industry.”
Okay, I’m depressed. Next week I am joining Microsoft for a 5 day/5 city tour to talk about interop with Web services. I have spent the last couple of days writing sample code for my demos and was nearing completion when I lost everything.
How did I lost it all? Simple. I re-ran the wstkconfig.bat from the IBM Web Services Toolkit to deploy the last Web service I planned to show. The other code was manually deployed but this time I decided to use the configuration tool just for fun. Little did I know it would delete the entire webapps/wstk directory, which contained the majority of my code that I manually deployed. All that work gone. Guess it’s time to start over.
Be warned: If using the IBM Web Services Toolkit, keep your original source in a safe place on the hard drive. That is, keep it in a place not under the live webapps.
Whew! What a day. I lost all my demo code for next week but I finally got it all re-created. Definitely some cool things happening in Java with regard to Web services. My favorite tool is Wsdl2Java. This generates a set of proxy classes for consuming a Web service and is a great time saver. Java2Wsdl on the other hand is a pain in the ass. I never got it working, but luckily Axis will auto-generate a WSDL for your service using a ?WSDL parameter on a HTTP GET request.
I finally have a demo environment setup that illustrates inteorp between .NET and Java 2 Platforms, and I have WS-Security working between Microsoft’s WSE and IBM’s WSTK. I must say that WSKT is poorly documented at the moment, which was a pain. Oh, and it seems that WSTK does not like the MustUnderstand attribute. Be sure to set that puppy to false if you are digitally signing a service request where the producer is using WSTK.
Overall, cool stuff. And I am glad I finally have a decent work environment for showing off the various technologies.
Pictures from Killington Spring Break are finally online in the Gallery. Enjoy.
Day 4 on Killington was very nice. The snow had soften up a bit. Runs of the day: Rim in the morning and the Chute in the afternoon. Also Great Bear was a blast and was the only trail I know of that still have evidence on Sunday’s snow storm. It’s un-groomed and has soft powder bumps.
Melanie and I leave Killington today. She flies out to Brussels tonight and I have to finish work on my demos for next week’s 5 day/5 city tour with Microsoft. I had planned to hit the slopes this morning for a few quick runs before leaving because the weather forecast was calling for a wintery mix, but it’s looks like that will not happen. And if I am going out for only an hour then I want to see new snow or at least a change in the conditions. Oh well. We will be back very soon.
Melanie and I joined the rest of the Davis family for fun in the snow at Killington, VT, for an extended weekend. Saturday was spent at Pico and was the return to the slopes for Brenna. She was taking it easy on her first day out, but by the next day she was skiing down Outer Limits.
Killington is offering an All East Spring Pass for only $199. This pass is for unlimited riding/skiing at various ASC resorts in the Northeast. And best of all, your meTicket balance can be used towards your purchase of the pass. Now that I have my pass, looks like Melanie and I will be spending much more time in Vermont over the next couple of months.
Lately I have started feeling the byte of the development bug. It’s been a while since I wrote any real code and the update to this site has got me wanting to do more. So to help get started and to fix the work into my job, I decided to write some true interop examples between J2EE and .NET. Today was all about installing the environment.
I created a new Windows 2000 Advance Server VM under VMWare, installed J2SE, Apache, TomCat, Axis, Xerces, and IBM’s Web Services ToolKit (WSTK). The combination took longer than installing Visual Studio.NET. Still, I was happy with the amount of online documentation and the ease of use of the various installation programs. I now have a clean environment ready for me to destroy. Only regret was that I did not use Windows .NET Server 2003. Including UDDI Services in my demo code would have been great.
I checked weather.com this morning to see the weekend forecast in the Killington area. The report is based on Rutland, VT, which had a chilly, current temp of -8 and windchill of -26. Burrrrrr…
I re-discovered VMWare today and I have to say the latest version totally kicks butt! I’m finally sportin’ a new laptop with lots of RAM and tons of hard drive space so I thought it was time to look at VMWare again. The latest workstation release, version 3.2, was very easy to install. And setting up a new virtual machine has never been easier. I had Windows 2000 Advance Server up and running in a VM session in under 45 minutes. No re-partitioning of the hard drive is required. All VM sessions are stored in a collection of files. Best of all, I can archive a clean install and restore it later after I have totally screwed up the environment. My next step is to setup an environment running Java, Apache, etc so I can demo .NET/J2EE interop. All developers should have the freedom of VMWare on their workstation.