| Monday, November 5 |
So many ideas and so many technologies are swirling around P2P --
decentralization, distributed computing, web services, JXTA, UDDI,
SOAP -- that its sometimes hard to see order in the chaos. If we look
past the labels and the individual applications, though, we can see
one thing clearly: The twin revolutions of the PC and the internet
collided in 1994, and for half a dozen years after, browser+server was
the indispensible internet architecture.
Today, we are witnessing a Great Re-wiring, a chance to reconsider how
the world's devices connect to the internet and to one another outside
the browser+server framework, and no matter what label we choose for
it, this re-wiring is transforming the network and how we use it.
Consuming Web Services exclusively on the server is an unscalable disaster waiting to happen. Everyone is so focused on the intricacies of back-end infrastructure, they tend to forget that, at the end of the day, the client computer needs to be able to work with these Web Services or it's all a waste of time. In this presentation, we explore how client-side technology should take advantage of the client's processing power and emerging standards, such as XML, SOAP & WSDL, to enable a true multi-tiered, Internet architecture. The end goal? An integrated platform that allows clients to pick and choose their Web Services wherever they may be.
This session explains the combining of a simple SOAP routing extension with the SOAP message model. The result is a very flexible SOAP message based infrastructure supporting a wide variety of message exchange patterns ranging from one-way, request/response, over dialogs and p2p scenarios.
This session addresses the question of how JXTA and Web services standards relate to each other. Project JXTA provides basic elements of a platform for peer-to-peer applications, including peer discovery, grouping, and communication mechanisms. Web services standards, including WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP, facilitate development of applications from distributed services by standardizing service description, discovery, and communication. The discussion draws on multiple application scenarios to illustrate what applications using a combination of these standards would look like.
While there has been no shortage of attention paid to the technical benefits of Web services-based architectures, the daunting task of answering the practical questions still remains. For Web service scenarios that span enterprises - and firewalls - these questions are particularly urgent. How do companies ensure that only authorized partners and customers are able to access their Web services? What are the best techniques to secure and manage business process communication over the Internet? What are the real costs associated with implementing and owning Web services solutions?
Using case studies from the company's customer portfolio, Craig Donato, president and CEO of Grand Central, will demonstrate how a web services network can provide the critical piece of infrastructure businesses need to use Web services to solve real world problems.
Key issues covered:
The forthcoming HailStorm technology has certainly lived up to its name: Microsoft has generated a raging storm of controversy around issues including privacy, openness, and more. This presentation will provide a technical overview of this technology, officially called the .NET Services, along with an examination of some of the larger issues it raises.
Mark Lucovsky, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft and the architect of the .NET My Services, discusses several Microsoft initiatives for building distributed services. Lucovsky outlines the .NET My Services programming model and how it is used for both peer-to-peer and distributed applications, as well as some related developments in peer-to-peer infrastructure.
| Tuesday, November 6 |
Given that the web is all about massive connectedness, what are the driving principles behind the evolution of the web and what do they tell us about the harmonisation of web services, peer-to-peer computing and wireless connectivity? Simon Phipps explores the principles behind the evolution of the web, position initiatives such as UDDI, SunONE and JXTA in the evolutionary scale, and peers into the future of services on the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision is for the World Wide Web to be universal in the
sense that it:
"... be able to contain in principle every bit of information accessible
by networks. It was designed to be able to include existing information
systems such as FTP, and to be able simply in the future to be extendable
to include any new information system."
Such integration of all information is the essence of the Web's value.
Some P2P innovations work within the framework of the World Wide Web, but
others such as Napster and Gnutella do not. The web's URI space is
specifically architected to leverage such new protocols; we can integrate
these P2P systems, not just with the tradiational web, but with each
other. If we don't, the "universal" web will fragment.
The purpose of this talk or panel discussion is to highlight the
absolutely fundamental importance of this issue, and to explore some of
the technical and logistical work involved in integrating a broader range
of P2P technologies into URI space, and into browsers, web application
servers, and other infrastructure of the World Wide Web.
Open Services are gaining momentum on the Internet, and will surely be as integral to the Net as Open Source. Open Services are in fact the network-enabled analogue of Open Source. The idea is that the combination of ease-of-use and the low cost and availability of computing and network capacity makes it possible for everyone to run a server or provide a network service. Many of which will be "open" or shared. Examples today are obvious. Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, SETI@Home, 802.11b, and on and on. Tomorrow, set top boxes and other Net-enabled items will use each others' published services. The challenges facing this growing phenomenon are beginning to show. Privacy and security concerns on networks; legal concerns regarding what you do on your connection, particularly in light of restrictive ISP user agreements; technical concerns on interoperability, etc. Open Services gives name to the practice. It subsumes P2P, as P2P is a particular approach to network Services, many of which are Open. In the same way "Open Source" provided a simple message and stable footing for "GPL" and "BSD" products, Open Services is a good social descriptor for many technically similar, but different concepts (Web services, file sharing, server sharing, shared network provisioning, decentralised networks, hybrid networks, centralised systems, and on and on).
This session outlines the tools needed to build web services. The Internet has changed everything -- including requirements for developer tools. Many IT organizations are evolving legacy applications into a collection of Internet services that can be accessed by any new application. There is little doubt that building applications that leverage a web services-based application architecture poses a series of challenges. What's needed: a new generation of Internet tools with services specific capabilities.
So what are Web Services and why do you care? This presentation will present a business and technical overview of Web Services. We'll explore what's happening in the standards world regarding SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. We'll take a look at some Web Services case studies. Then we'll finish with discussion of how to get started building Web Services.
This presentation will focus on the technical issues related to using XSLT
with Web Services. We will introduce the concept of Web Services and
describe the XML technologies that make up the standards for Web Services
(SOAP, XML-RPC, WSDL). We will look at XSLT and its proper place in a Web
Service developer's toolset. We will examine how XSLT can be applied as a
testing and prototyping tool for SOAP endpoints. XSLT can also be used to
manipulate WSDL. We will show how WSDL files provide metadata about Web
Services that XSLT can use to generate HTML help or client scripts.
We will explore the limits of XSLT as a solution for Web Services. XSLT can
only do so much for developers working in C++, Java, or other languages. If
we write our Web Service code in XML, however, there are really no limits to
what XSLT can do. XSLT can transform our service code into WSDL, HTML help,
or even another XSLT document to process requests. We will introduce a
framework written in XSLT that can serve as a Web Services toolkit for XSLT
developers. Using this framework, we will be able to develop and deploy Web
Services written entirely in XSLT, or leverage the abilities of the XSLT
processors to write Web Services in script code.
This panel discussion is an exploration of the nexus(es) between Peer-to-Peer and Web Services, and focuses on finding the commonalities (and differences) in what seems to be a confluence of two ever-similar world views. Are Web services too Web-centric to be considered true P2P? How is this related to today's P2P applications employing their own little Web servers? What problems do XML-based Web Services and decentralized P2P frameworks solve for one-another? Are SOAP and XML-RPC strong enough to provide some of the glue?
This session is a case study of an XML-RPC service that bridged two separately developed applications after both were deployed (Digital Asset Management Viewer and AmaRank). Although code examples will be shown in Perl and XML-RPC, the concepts presented here apply to any web service. Web services allow programs written in arbritary languages to talk to each other. XML-RPC is a web service protocol authored by Dave Winer of Userland and is the progenitor of SOAP. The simplicity of XML-RPC allows programmers to rapidly create web services.
The air of late is thick with talk of identity. The holy grail is a unified, decentralized, simple yet extensible user-centric identity, membership, and preferences fabric for the Internet. It is easy to see why this is rapidly becoming a major battleground between big players and big technology, each of which take different approaches to Identity Services. Adam Theo surveys the Identity landscape and shares some of his experiences building such a system for the Jabber instant messaging framework.
What the web did for business-to-consumer interactions, web services are poised to do for business-to-business interactions. Built on top of new and emerging technologies such as HTTP, XML, SOAP, and UDDI, web services are the next horizon for e-business. The key to reaching this horizon is a common program-to-program communication model that changes the rules of integration both within and across new and existing enterprise systems.
This presentation will cover web services: what they are, why and how they are changing program-to-program communication, and how they are transforming businesses. It will explain the key web services standards, their adoption in the industry, and some of the key emerging directions. Finally it will give a brief summary of IBM's current and future product support for developing and deploying web services.
| Wednesday, November 7 |
Congressman Rick Boucher (D - VA), leading architect of federal policy for the Internet, discusses the impact of web services and peer services on the Internet legislative scene.
Larry Lessig describes the changes in law and technology that threaten the innovation commons created by the Internet.