The Web services architecture includes a rich suite of specifications that provide complementary functions in the areas of security, reliability, and transaction-based messaging. By design, these specifications may be used together to meet varied service requirements.

.NET offers an elegant way to store configuration data for applications the .config file. You can use that mechanism in both Windows and ASP.NET applications.

Microsoft is investing millions in promoting .NET and its advantages. One of the many plugged advantages of the Microsoft .NET initiative is XML Web Services – the ability to remove your business logic from custom DLLs and COM/DCOM components (helping to avoid DLL hell) and hosting your middle tier business logic as Web Services, which can be accessed by all your applications (Web Sites, Distributed Applications, etc.) (see this article for more information on creating and consuming Web Services in .NET). But how do you use some of these new Web Services you have developed in a staggered upgrade of your existing 'Classic' ASP Applications?

This article demonstrates how to use the new Microsoft Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) to build ASP.NET XML Web Services that do UsernameToken authentication and X.509 authentication by digitally signing portions of the SOAP message, as well as how to inspect and verify the WS-Security support that is included with a SOAP message.

This chapter discusses web services and some of the Perl facilities that support them.

Networks are everywhere. The Web is a network of linked resources. The Internet is a network of routers. Markets are networks of economic actors connected by the transactions in which they engage. Underlying this last network of business entities is a trust network that connects companies together through the trust relationships in which they participate. In the emerging web services security infrastructure, the hubs in these trust networks are called assertion authorities or security token services. Just as airport hubs like O'Hare and Heathrow make it easier to get from one node to another, the hubs of a trust network allow companies to trust each other. Without hubs to facilitate the establishment of trust between other nodes in the network, these entities would need to establish and manage trust with each other on an individual basis, which can quickly become impractical.

Learn about the support for policy, trust, content token, and new programming model capabilities in Web Services Enhancements 2.0.

DataPower and Computer Associates have extended their existing partnership for providing unified XML Web services security and management by integrating DataPower's XS40 XML Security Gateway with CA's eTrust Identity and Access Management Suite.

Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET (WSE) is a supported add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework providing developers the latest advanced Web services capabilities to keep pace with the evolving Web services protocol specifications. WSE 2.0 simplifies the development and deployment of secure Web services by enabling developers using Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to more easily apply security policy, establish long-running secure conversations, retrieve and validate security tokens and more. New features include a policy framework, enhanced security model, message-oriented programming model, and support for multiple hosting environments.

This series describes the process of building, deploying, and using high-throughput Web services for bioinformatics applications. This is meant to serve as a guide for development of software based on the Open-Bioinformatics Foundations software toolkits with packages such as BioPerl, BioJava, and BioPython. This article provides directions for how to deploy a service and present a new implementation of document-style Web services extensions to the BioPerl module that will allow a wide range of existing applications to consume such services.

This final tip in the roundtrip series discusses how to use the mapping meta-data file to work around roundtripping issues. This final roundtrip tip will show you how to use the mapping meta-data file to work around the roundtrip issues, which we encountered in the first two tips of this series.

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) on Tuesday announced the release of the working-group draft of the WS-I Basic Security Profile. WS-I officials made the announcement at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Los Angeles. The draft is now available so that users and developers can assess the profile and send feedback to the organization, officials said.

With work on the WS-I Basic Profile having wrapped up in March, the organization got a little granular Tuesday at Gartner's Application Integration and Web Services Summit by turning its attention toward security.

Service Integrity(TM), developer of XML Visibility Software, is proud to announce the release of "Securing Web Services with WS-Security," the first comprehensive book covering the SAML 1.1 and WS-Security Standards. Published by SAMS Publishing, the book is co-authored by Dr. Jothy Rosenberg, founder, CEO and CTO of Service Integrity, and David Remy, Director and Product Architect for BEA Systems, Inc. The work will aid IT management and Web services developers as they comply with the WS-Security standard, which was approved as an official OASIS standard in April 2004.

Web services have matured to the point that they are ready to become mainstream in business application development, not just an experimental "Skunk Works" project, according to industry analysts speaking at an applications integration conference here Monday.

This article describes how to call Apartment objects from XML Web services through the COM interoperability layer.

Eliminate organizational dependence on the SOAP Toolkit to expose COM components as Web services. See how to consume Web services written on any platform from legacy environments such as COM components and classic ASP pages.

X-registry is a new product from Infravio designed to help companies with a portfolio of Web services manage them all. It's designed to create an online "marketplace" of Web services for an intranet or extranet, and to help people navigate through available offerings and effectively consume them. It also ties into Infravio's other software (and into their partnership with NetIQ) as a part of an overall Web services management solution.

The Web Services Task Force of the Internationalization Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios with additional guidance for implementers of Web service technologies. The document examines how language, culture and related issues interact with Web services architecture and technology.

Developers can use Java API for XML-based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC) to map Web service operations onto Java method calls. The concept is fairly straightforward. A Web service consists of one or more operations, and each operation typically contains an input message and an output message. Each operation typically maps to a method on a Java interface, with the input message mapping to method parameters and the output message mapping to the method return type.