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amrameshreddy.blog.com402 CHAPTER 13 ■ IMPLEMENTING SOA INTEROPERABILITYramrameshreddy.blog.comThe tack for cross-platform interoperability is to work primarily with the standards aspublished by industry-supported and industry-controlled committees. However, each vendorhas the tendency to implement its “interpretation” of the standard. To achieve a neutral perspective,the WCF team generated many compatibility tests for a subset of the different vendorimplementations. In addition to internal testing, Microsoft created the WCF InteroperabilityPlug-Fest 1 program to work with stack vendors to achieve greater compliance and compatibility.One of the more notable participants in the Plug-Fest program and offering general WCFinteroperability has been Sun. The Sun web services team worked alongside the WCF team onseveral occasions and has publicly released an open source framework focused primarily oninteroperability with WCF. Started as Project Tango, 2 it has evolved into Web Services InteroperabilityTechnology 3 (WSIT), which is available today in open source form. The main capabilitiesand standards provided in WSIT are as follows:• Bootstrapping communication (WS-MetaDataExchange)• Securing communication (WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Security, and WS-Trust)• Optimizing communication (MTOM and WS-SecureConversation)• Enabling reliability (WS-ReliableMessaging)• Enabling atomic transactions (WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransactions)Another major participant in the WCF/.NET interoperability process is the Axis projectfrom the Apache Software Foundation. 4 It’s a major participant in that the WCF team hasworked with Axis on its own, ensuring WCF compliance with the WS-* standards by leveragingAxis. Additionally, the Axis team reports that it too has done interoperability testing for theAxis2 1.0 release from May 2006.Non-Microsoft SOA PlatformsWe briefly discussed Sun as a commercial product vendor that has resources focused on .NETand WCF interoperability. Sun is not alone in that commitment. We cannot cover in this shortchapter what every vendor or open source team has produced in support of WS-* andWCF/.NET interoperability. However, we’ll focus on a few key vendors that have openly supportedand worked with .NET interoperability issues. Table 13-1 lists the leading vendors andtheir support of the WS-* standards within their products. 5ramrameshreddyramrameshreddy1. You can find documents and background for the WCF Interoperability Plug-Fest program athttp://www.mssoapinterop.org/ilab/.2. You can find Harold Carr’s blog entry about Project Tango at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/haroldcarr/archive/2006/02/an_overview_of_1.html.3. You can find the WSIT home page at http://java.sun.com/webservices/interop/index.jsp.4. You can find the Apache Axis2 home page at http://ws.apache.org/axis2/.5. Apache is listed as a vendor even though it is an open source foundation supported by communitymembers.