practical topics for web services zealots

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Spirit of the DevCon

The goal of the Web Services DevCon is to cut away all the unessential conference baggage and concentrate on why we're spending time at a conference in the first place -- the talks by industry experts and experienced practitioners. By doing so, we can keep the price, and your wasted time, to a minimum. In fact, if you don't go away with your head hurting from all the new ideas you've heard, we've haven't done our job!

The Web Services DevCon East in October in Bedford, Mass. (16 miles outside of Boston) is as a direct result of the warm reception we got for the DevCon West in Beaverton, OR in March. West sold out, so if you're interested, sign up for East as soon as possible.

Summary

What 2 days of practical Web Services sessions from industry experts and practioners
When October 10-11, 2002, 9am-6pm, registration starts at 8am on Thursday
Where Renaissance Bedford Hotel, Bedford, Mass., 44 Middlesex Turnpike, Bedford, MA, 01730, 781-275-5500. Make sure to mention the "Web Services DevCon" for the discount rate of $145/night.

Alternate hotels in the area:

  • Wyndham Billerica Hotel, (978) 670-7500
  • Boston Marriott Burlington, (781) 229-6565
  • Four Points Sheraton Burlington, (781) 272-8800
  • Homestead Village, (781) 359-9099
  • Candlewood Suites, (781) 229-4300
  • Summerfield Suites - Boston/Burlington, 781-270-0800

If you're flying, you want to target the Boston Logan Airport (airport code: BOS). There's also an airport in Bedford, but you can only get there from Philadelphia, Trenton, Martha's Vinyard, or Nantucket.

Car services you can call to take you from the airport to the hotel:

  • Flight Line Inc: 800-245-2525
  • Airporter: 877-899-6161
  • M & L Transportation: 781-938-8646
Cost $445 for the talks, a t-shirt, two days of lunch and snacks and Thursday evening reception.
Your travel and hotel expenses are not part of the conference cost. If you need to cancel, that must be done 30 days prior to the start of the conference.

Sessions and Speakers

When What Who
Thursday, October 10th
8:00am Registration  
8:45am Welcome Chris Sells & Tim Ewald
9:00am Keynote: Interop Is All Sam Ruby
10:00am Apache Axis: History, Architecture and Why Open-Source SOAP Implementations Are So Cool Glen Daniels
11:00am

Designing a RESTful SOAP API

Peter Drayton
11:50am Lunch & Web Services Faceplates at 12:30pm Stuart Celarier
1:00pm When Web Services Go Bad Steve Loughran
2:00pm

W3C XML Schema: What You Might Not Know (and Might or Might Not Like!)

Noah Mendelsohn
3:00pm

Using Inheritance in a Web Services with Apache and ASP.NET

Scott Seely
4:00pm Web Services in the Doctor's Office Dr. Aleksey Nudelman
5:00pm .NET, XSLT, and Web Services Christopher Dix
6:00pm Reception  
6:30pm Speaker Panel: Web Services Futures All (MC’d by Chris Sells)
Friday, October 11th
9:00am

What’s In a Name: Types and Semantics In a Web Service Universe

Don Box
10:00am

The Right Way to Build Web Services

Yasser Shohoud
11:00am Web Services Diagnostics David Seidel & Mark Ericson
11:50am Lunch & Demo: Exposing the Middle Tier via Web Services Using DeKlarit at 12:30pm DeKlarit
1:00pm

Going Outside the Lines: Building Web Services Using System.XML

Tim Ewald
2:00pm

Network Infrastructure Requirements for Web Services

Eugene Kuznetsov
3:00pm

Web Service Security Support in .NET

Keith Ballinger
4:00pm

The XML Web Services X-Files: Tales from the Labs

Clemens Vasters
5:00pm

What Web Services Needs to Know About PKI

Rich Salz

Sign Me Up!

Register online now for only $445

If you would prefer not to use the online registration, please send a check for $445 to:

Sells Brothers, Inc.
8539 SW 166th Terrace
Beaverton, OR  97007
503-296-2027

Sponsors

If you're interested in sponsoring the Web Services DevCon, let us know.

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Session Abstracts

Keynote: Interop Is All

Sam Ruby, IBM

.NET, XSLT, and Web Services

Christopher Dix

With a little help from the .NET Framework, XSLT stylesheets can function as both the logic and the engine behind a Web Service. Because XSLT is itself XML, the "language barriers" between programming languages like C++ and C# and the data representation of XML disappear, and this approach opens up some interesting possibilities for developers. In this session we will explain how to create SOAP endpoints easily using XSLT and .NET, and we will show by example how to use the same approach to generate WSDL and HTML documentation for those endpoints.

Apache Axis: History, Architecture and Why Open-Source SOAP Implementations Are So Cool

Glen Daniels, Macromedia

The Axis SOAP engine from Apache is an open-source Java toolkit for Web Services. From its humble beginnings as a modular rearchitecture of Apache SOAP v2, it has grown into a highly functional and flexible package which includes WSDL processing, a powerful extensibility model, convenience features such as instant deployment, and a complete JAX-RPC/SAAJ implementation. In this talk, we'll discuss the history and design philosophy behind Axis, and describe how the Axis model can be used to implement everything from simple RPC services to complex enterprise apps using SOAP extensions. Throw in a little speculation as to futures, add a dash of Q&A, and you've got the picture!

Designing a RESTful SOAP API

Peter Drayton, Razorsoft

The relationship between REST and SOAP has been a source of vociferous debate within the web services community, even resulting in modifications to the SOAP 1.2 specs to bring them in line with the web architecture. However, despite the rhetoric many people still don't understand REST, and don't realize that SOAP can be used in a RESTful manner. This talk will explore REST, how it relates to legacy RPC-style SOAP, and how to incorporate RESTian thinking into the design of a message-oriented SOAP API.

Going Outside the Lines: Building Web Services Using System.XML

Tim Ewald, Microsoft

The Web services platform provides a substrate for building distributed applications that communicate using XML messages. The .NET framework includes ASP.NET WebMethods and Remoting, two frameworks for mapping XML messages to method calls. This talk explores building Web services without using either framework, focusing on techniques for building loosely-coupled applications by programming with XML messages in the raw.

Network Infrastructure Requirements for Web Services

Eugene Kuznetsov, DataPower

This talk will discuss web services from a network infrastructure (rather than application programming) point of view. Some of the intriguing questions in that context are: What kinds of demands do web services protocols place on the existing TCP/IP networks? Do the lessons from mass rollouts of other protocols apply to SOAP or UDDI? What to consider when preparing a network for a web services application today? What types of new network equipment is likely to be associated with a web services project a year from now? What kinds of new "in-the-network" services are likely to emerge to ease web services deployment?

The Right Way to Build Web Services

Yasser Shohoud

Most developers building Web services today are building them the wrong way. The process of creating Web service classes with Web methods misses the entire point of Web services: The data being exchanged. To get the most out of Web services, and to successfully implement large-scale Web service solutions, you need to begin by designing this data exchange. This session will walk you through the right way of building Web services beginning with data modeling, interface definition then interface implementation using Web methods. We will then discuss some alternatives for versioning this Web service based on XSD derived types and WSDL bindings.

The XML Web Services X-Files: Tales from the Labs

Clemens Vasters, Newtelligence

All of us have now seen about 1001 demos on how [WebMethod] turns a method into an XML Web Service endpoint in Microsoft® ASP.NET. It's amazing, isn't it? Did you know that you can add code to intercept XML Web Service calls to add you own processing of headers? Did you know that you can tune and tweak the WSDL generated by ASP.NET? Did you know that you can influence what code "Add Web Reference" creates in Visual Studio® .NET? If you want to unlock the potential of the "other 90%" of the ASP.NET XML Web services infrastructure beyond [WebMethod], this session is for you. In this session you will learn how to build an XML Web service processing pipeline using ASP.NET and how to hook your extension code into the ASP.NET infrastructure. The demos include Kerberos and clear text authentication, TIP transaction propagation, cookieless session management as well as Web service exception filtering and logging.

Using Inheritance in a Web Services with Apache and ASP.NET

Scott Seely, Microsoft

Polymorphism and inheritance have become technologies that many developers have come to depend on. Many people see Web services and come to the conclusion that these tools are taken away. It’s just not true! This talk explains some techniques that you can apply to allow Web service methods to accept and use polymorphic data types. It also explains what the internal code needs to do in order to take advantage of these techniques. Examples will be presented using Apache Axis and ASP.NET Web services.

W3C XML Schema: What You Might Not Know (and Might or Might Not Like!)

Noah Mendelsohn, IBM

With all the discussion and controversy surrounding the W3C XML Schema language, some important features are widely misunderstood (or even unnoticed). In this session, one of the designers of the language will lead a discussion of the design tradeoffs that led to some of these interesting features, and will explore the related use cases that Schema attempts to handle. This session will not be a tutorial on the language but more of a case study in schema language design: it should be of interest whether or not you already know a lot about XML Schemas. Of course, if you're planning to use XML Schema, you may pick up some tips.

Web Service Security Support in .NET

Keith Ballinger, Microsoft

Learn how you can use the .NET Framework to build secure Web services.

Web Services Diagnostics

David Seidel & Mark Ericson, Mindreef

The speakers will present practical techniques for diagnosing common problems developing and deploying Web Services. You will learn to use several freely available tools that help visualize SOAP communications and quickly track down problems. Client and server-side debugging techniques for various SOAP toolkits will also be presented. This session will show examples of real-world problems and live use of tools for problem diagnosis.

Web Service Faceplates

A Web Service Faceplate is a user interface client for a Web Service, generally implemented by the developers of the service. It provide a lightweight, visual representation of a Web Service suitable for portal or dashboard applications. Faceplates are written using open standards of XML, XSLT and Javascript, (potentially) allowing them to be hosted in any browser on any platform. A very deliberate effort is made to minimize network roundtrips, and to partition the client into declarative (XSLT) and procedural (Javascript) code, which makes Faceplates efficient to use and easy to write.

Web Services in the Doctor's Office

Dr. Aleksey Nudelman

Due to revolutionary improvements in the medical care, we live longer and healthier lives. The quality of the health care depends crucially on the ability of hospitals, labs, health management organizations and physicians to exchange patient data. As medical tests become more and more complex, there is a need to exchange larger and larger amounts of information in heterogeneous and proprietary formats. Web Services can provide us with a standard to quickly, efficiently and securely exchange data between various medical facilities.

What Web Services Needs to Know About PKI

Rich Salz, DataPower

SAML, XACL, XKMS and WS-Security: the growing number of complex XML security standards is enough to make one long for the good old days of ASN.1, DER, and X.509v3 object identifiers. In this talk I'll cover the proposed XML security standards – there are reasons why there are so many of them -- and explain when each is appropriate. The second part will walk through some of the hard issues confronted by enterprise and/or Internet security infrastructures, with the intent of pointing out how these problems are addressed or ignored by the current security activities.

What’s In a Name: Types and Semantics In a Web Service Universe

Don Box, Microsoft

Developers coming from “commercial” programming languages (e.g., Java, C++, VB) have a variety of preconceived notions as to how types convey semantics. These notions deeply color their perception of how web services should be developed, integrated, and discovered. This talk looks at the alternatives and tradeoffs between various approaches to these issues, including topics such as the perils of nominal type equivalence, loose vs. tight coupling, intended use, constrained agreement via contracts, and the impact of WSDL/XSD on web service protocols and infrastructure.

When Web Services Go Bad

Steve Loughran, HP

When do web services go bad? When they go live! This talk will cover the practical problems of building and deploying a moderately sized web service which provides custom image storage and rendering to a partner company. The issues of scalability, configuration and general deployment soon dwarfed the basic 'getting it to work' problem. The proposed solution is to take a deployment centric approach, making the needs of operations central to the system, rather than an afterthought, and extending the standard software practices of testing, use cases and defect tracking to the deployment and operations processes.

Speaker Panel: Web Services Futures

Master of Ceremonies, Chris Sells, Sells Brothers

Sure, it's all pretty during the talks and the demos, but when the audience gets to let loose on the speakers, those building the web services infrastructure and the blazing the trail applying web services in the real world, that's when the fun really starts! Got a pet peeve that you want HP or IBM or Microsoft to really hear? Got an advanced question that you haven't been able to get answered anywhere else? This is the session for you!

Demo: Exposing the Middle Tier via Web Services Using DeKlarit

DeKlarit

Speaker Bios

Dr. Aleksey Nudelman

Aleksey Nudelman is in charge of .NET development at the Atlas Development Corp where he is looking for ways to improve medical data exchange. Prior to joining Atlas, Dr. Nudelman has been a .NET consultant and instructor. Mr. Nudelman holds a Ph. D. in Physics from UC, Santa Barbara where, as a Research Associate, he worked on applications of Superstring theory to problems of High Energy Physics.

Chris Sells, Sells Brothers

Chris Sells in an independent consultant, specializing in distributed applications in .NET and COM, as well as an instructor for DevelopMentor. He's written several books, including ATL Internals, which is in the process of being updated for ATL7 as you read this. He's also working on Essential Windows Forms for Addison-Wesley and Mastering Visual Studio .NET for O’Reilly. In his free time, Chris hosts the Web Services DevCon, directs the Genghis source-available project, plays with Rotor and, in general, makes a pest of himself at Microsoft design reviews.

Christopher Dix

Chris Dix is an author and software developer specializing in XML and Web Services, and he is the creator of the Kafka XSLT SOAP Toolkit. He has co-authored Professional XML Web Services (Wrox), Beginning XML 2nd Edition (Wrox), and The XML Schema Complete Reference (Addison-Wesley). Chris has spoken at a number of conferences, including the O'Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference. He can be reached at chris@thoughtpost.com.

Clemens Vasters, Newtelligence

Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies. newtelligence offers architectural guidance, architecture and implementation reviews and offers Microsoft .NET training workshops tailored to customer's projects and existing developer skills. Clemens has well over a decade of experience as a developer and software architect of financial solutions for the banking industry, portal solutions and application infrastructure services. He frequently speaks at major developer conferences throughout Europe, such as Microsoft TechEd Europe, the Microsoft Developer Days in Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Spain and the Visual Studio .NET launch events in Germany and Norway. Clemens also is one of the MSDN Regional Directors for Germany. Clemens current work focuses on XML Web Services infrastructures and Enterprise Services in the context of the .NET Framework.

David Seidel, Mindreef

Dave has been a software developer for 16 years. Before founding Mindreef, he was a founder and CTO for Cultureport, Inc, where he worked primarily with Internet-related technologies. He worked for several years at NuMega Technologies (now part of Compuware) as a senior engineer on the BoundsChecker team and as Program Manager for the BoundsChecker and JCheck teams. While at NuMega, he participated in work that resulted in two patents (US6332213 and US6314558). Prior to that, he worked for Fleet Financial Services, Innovative Data Concepts, and Dragonfly Software.

Don Box, Microsoft

Don Box is an architect at Microsoft working on next generation web service protocols and plumbing. His interests include type systems for XML and web services, metadata and discovery, and CLR-based software integration. Don's work with web services began in 1998 as one of the original authors of the SOAP specification. Don's latest book, Essential .NET is due out this year from Addison-Wesley.

Eugene Kuznetsov, DataPower

Eugene Kuznetsov is the founder & CTO of DataPower Technology, Inc., which counts XSLTMark (XSLT benchmark), XSLJIT (XSLT JIT machine-code compiler technology) and XA35 XML Acceleration Router (XML/SOAP router) among its products.

Glen Daniels, Macromedia

Glen is the technical lead for Macromedia's Web Services team, and also represents the company in the Web Services groups at the W3C. He contributes actively to the Apache Axis project, and is a strong believer in open-source software. His 13 years in the software industry have run the gamut from device drivers through middleware to user interfaces, all with a slant towards distributed computing. He is also one of the authors of the popular book "Building Web Services With Java", published by SAMS. When not doing geeky stuff, he enjoys playing music, skiing, cooking, and playing with his cats.

Keith Ballinger, Microsoft

Keith Ballinger is Program Manager for Xml Web Services in Microsoft's .NET Framework group. He's a key contributor to several features in the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. In addition, he's co-authored the Web Services Inspection Language and contributed to other various Web service specifications. He speaks at a variety of conferences, including Tech Ed and the PDC. He's the co-author of "Special Edition: Using Active Server Pages", and the technical editor of "Using Netscape IFC" and "Special Edition: Using Visual Studio". He also wrote the forward to the recent "Introducing Microsoft .NET". He is currently writing a book on Web services architecture and implementation for Addison-Wesley.

Mark Ericson, MindReef

Mark has been a participant or leader in many industry standards activities among them the OMG, CILabs, ebXML, JCP and W3C. As an active participant in the OMG Mark served a term as chair of the ORBOS task force, and was co-author or editor of many OMG specifications. He also contributed to early Java standards including Java Beans, RMI, Servlets, and JNDI.

Noah Mendelsohn, IBM

Noah Mendelsohn is a Distinguished Engineer at the IBM Corporation. He is a co-author of the SOAP version 1.1 specifications, and a co-editor of both the W3C XML Schemas proposed recommendation and the W3C SOAP 1.2 working drafts. Earlier, he contributed to the creation of the JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans specifications. He has over 30 years experience doing development and research on operating systems, programming languages, and distributed systems.

Peter Drayton, Razorsoft

Peter Drayton is an independent consultant, an author, and an instructor for DevelopMentor where he teaches .NET, CLR and C# classes. Before .NET Peter spent ten years working and consulting as a developer, architect and technical manager for startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and Cape Town, South Africa. Peter co-authored C# Essentials and C# in a Nutshell for O'Reilly, is co-authoring CLR Internals for Addison-Wesley, and is an editor and columnist for Sys-Con's .NET Developer Journal. Peter holds Bachelors and Honors degrees in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Rich Salz, DataPower

Rich has been active in the Internet, distributed systems, and security sphere for over a decade. He has extensive experience with open source, including INN the world's most popular Usenet implementation and a leading SOAP implementation for Python, and even more experience with open standards organizations, including OSF, IETF, W3C, and OASIS. He
has contributed to several specifications, including HTTP, NTTP, IETF PKIX (especially OCSP), ebXML, SOAP, XKMS, and SAML. He tries to use the latter to help make the former more fun and useful.

Sam Ruby, IBM

Sam is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM and is involved in a host of open source initiatives. He is a Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation and a developer on the Apache Soap project. He is also the chairman of the Jakarta project, who's mission is to provide commercial-quality server solutions based on the Java Platform, developed in an open and cooperative fashion. He is a member of the XML PMC, an officer of ECMA and convener of the TC39 group standardizing the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) for the .NET Framework. He is a member of the PHP group, a select group of developers who contribute to core PHP. He is also on the ActiveState Technical Advisory board. Sam holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Math from Christopher Newport College.

Scott Seely, Microsoft

Scott Seely is a Software Design Engineer on MSDN. What does this translate to in terms of work duties? Scott writes samples and articles about whatever interests him in the Web services space. On MSDN, Scott co-author's the "At Your Service" column and helped build the Cold Rooster Server Side Favorites sample. He's also a representative to WS-I.org and an accomplished author in his own right. He has written SOAP: Cross Platform Web Service Development Using XML (Prentice Hall-PTR), Windows Shell Programming (Prentice Hall-PTR), and co-authored Creating and Consuming Web Services in Visual Basic (Addison-Wesley).

Steve Loughran, HP

Steve Loughran is a research scientist at HP Laboratories in the UK, currently on a sabbatical in the imaging and printing part of HP designing and building Web Services to optimistic deadlines. Some of these web services have been live for six months; the development and deployment process providing significant experience in the techniques and pitfalls working under this new service delivery model.

Stuart Celarier, Fern Creek

Stuart is an independent consultant and instructor in Portland, Oregon, and chairs the Web Services SIG of the Portland Area .NET Users Group. His professional passions run from XML and XSLT to the .NET Framework and Managed Extensions for C++. He is the author of the article "XSLT in MSXML" published on www.perfectxml.com.

Tim Ewald, Microsoft

Tim Ewald is a Program Manager for XML Web Services at Microsoft. Tim's job is to ensure that developers get the information they need to use Web services today and to understand where they are going tomorrow, primarily through the new XML Web Services Developer Center website. Tim also works on Web service specifications and APIs. Before joining Microsoft, Tim spent 5+ years as a Principal Scientist at DevelopMentor, where he focused on COM, COM+, XML and .NET. Tim speaks internationally at numerous conferences, writes articles and columns for technical journals, and is the author of Transactional COM+: Building Scalable Applications (and other books) from Addison Wesley. Tim loves the spirit of the DevCon.

Yasser Shohoud

Yasser Shohoud is a software architect and trainer specializing in XML Web services. He speaks at industry conferences, writes for several magazines and has authored Real World XML Web Services, Addison Wesley. Yasser also publishes the monthly .NET Web Services newsletter online at http://LearnXmlws.com.

Sister Conferences

Sun Microsystems is sponsoring a SOAPBuilder's F2F meeting at the Sun Burlington campus (less than 10 minutes away from the DevCon hotel) October 8-9, so feel free to make a week of it! : )

Also, if you like the web (and who doesn't?), check out Robert Scoble's WebBuilder conference. Not only does it cover topics "[f]rom the latest technologies to the cutting edge trends and time saving techniques in Web building," it's in Vegas!

Subject to Change

All of the material on this web site is subject to change. In fact, it's feedback from you, the Web Services developer community, that can affect change. If you've got something to say, say it now.

Sightings

If you'd like to host the Web Services DevCon logo on your site, please do! The link is http://www.sellsbrothers.com/conference/. Thanks!

Said about the DevCon West:

About Keynote, Don Box:

About .NET Web Service interop in the real world, Tim Ewald

About Comparing the Two .NET SOAP Stacks, Brent Rector

About "When Web Services Go Bad," Steve Loughran

About "Network infrastructure requirements for web services," Eugene Kuznetsov

About "Unusual applications of web services", Patrick Logan

About "SOAP over alternate protocols," Peter Drayton

About "Implementing GXA specifications on .NET," Keith Ballinger

About "Using XSLT to implement web services," Craig Andera

Site

This site, and all its contents, are copyright © 2001-2002, Chris Sells and Tim Ewald. All rights reserved. Please contact csells@sellsbrothers.com with any comments or suggestions.