Status report for the Web Services Project
Noteable Happenings
Code Releases [since the last report]
Axis1.2RC has been released; the final release is expected early next year, though there may be one more release candidate first. Stability is good, and there is active work improving performance.
AxisCPP 1.3 Final and 1.4 alpha has been released. The team is making every effort to ensure stability and cleaner architectural seperation between the C and C++ implementations. In 1.4 C support was temporarily removed and would be included back in 1.5 which is due by the end of January 2005.
New Projects
Kandula
The specifications WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity, released jointly by Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems define a framework for transaction management in the web services environment.
Kandula will provide an open-source implementation of above specifications based on Axis. The initial implementation will be in Java using Axis/Java. A C++ implementation based on Axis/C++ is also underway.
In addition to providing an implementation, a major focus of this project would be to ensure interoperability with other implementations of above specifications, particularly those by Microsoft (.NET) and IBM.
The initial development work that formed the basis for the Kandula project was carried out at Lanka Software Foundation (LSF).
EWS
EWS is, a implementation of the following specifications
- JSR 109, JSR 109: Implementing Enterprise Web Services
- JSR 921, Implementing Enterprise Web Services 1.1
Project has about one year History now, first discussion done on the Axis Dev and the development started at sf.net then we have it in Axis contrib and finally it is at Webservices SVN.
The work is underway to use EWS to provide Web Service stack of the Geronimo together with the Axis.
Apollo
The Apollo incubator project aims to build a robust Java implementation of the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) family of specifications.
WSRF defines a generic and open framework for modeling and accessing stateful resources using Web services. This includes mechanisms to describe views on the state, to support management of the state through properties associated with the Web service, and to describe how these mechanisms are extensible to groups of Web services.
The initial development work for this project will be based upon contributions from the Globus Alliance and HP.
Hermes
The Hermes incubator project will use the WSRF components developed by the Apollo project and further enhance them by providing a Java implementation of the WS-Notification family of standards. WS-Notification consists of a set of specification for implementing pub-sub scenarios in a web services setting.
The initial development work for this project will be based upon contributions from the Globus Alliance and HP.
Muse
The Muse incubator project contains a WSDM MuWS 0.5 implementation (and underlying impls of WSRF and WSN 1.1) that was contributed by HP.
The next generation of Muse will implement MuWS 1.0 and will be built upon the Apollo WSRF 1.2 impl and the Hermes WSN 1.2 impl (see above).
Legal Issues
Cross-Project Issues
Problems with committers, members, projects etc?
Miscellaneous
We have a received a proposal from an existing open source project to adopt some of their Grid projects. This is interesting. The underpinnings of the Java side of the project are Axis and extensions - WS-A and WSRF, so there is much common underlying technology. If we go ahead with this incubation, then long term there may be an opportunity for a Grid section within Apache.