GT 4.2.1 Release Notes: C WS Core


1. Component Overview

The C WS Core provides a basic toolset in C for creating WSRF-enabled web services and clients conforming to the WS-Resource and WS-Notification specifications.

2. Feature summary

New Features in the GT 4.2.1 release

  • Implementation of the 2004/06 OASIS WS-ServiceGroup working draft specification as an API and a service operation provider. Added support for service-side WSN.
  • Command-line tools for accessing WSRF operations (WSN, WSRP, WSRL).

Other Supported Features

  • Implementation of the 2004/06 OASIS WSRF and WSN (client) working draft specifications. Implementation of the March 2004 version of the WS-Addressing specification).
  • SOAP transport over HTTP/1.1 for clients and services.
  • Embeddable service engine with dynamic loading of service code.
  • Automatic generation of ANSI-C stubs and service skeletons from Document/Literal WSDL schema and XML schema documents.

Deprecated Features

  • None

3. Summary of Changes in C WS Core

Other than bugfixes, no changes have occurred for C WS Core since the last stable release, 4.2.0.

4. Bug Fixes

  • Bug 6170: addressing handler generates bad wsa:From in certain error conditions
  • Bug 6174: globus-wsrf-cgen -help misses options
  • Bug 6253: API documentation missing for globus_c_ws_messaging on www.globus.org
  • Bug 6258: C bindings SOAP message client error
  • Bug 6378: SOAP message handle reuse clears security attributes between calls

5. Known Problems

The following problems and limitations are known to exist for C WS Core at the time of the 4.2.1 release:

5.1. Limitations

  • No implementation of WS-SecureConversation

5.2. Outstanding bugs

  • Bug 2209: changes to C bindings gen
  • Bug 2310: support for http get queries of WSDL schemas
  • Bug 2318: enhancement: data comparisions in type_info
  • Bug 2501: array_push should be array_insert
  • Bug 3197: GLOBUS_L_SERVICE_ENGINE_REQUEST_HEADER_FAILED lock missing
  • Bug 3405: default serialization does not order correctly with respect to unqualified attributes
  • Bug 3615: debugging improvements
  • Bug 3806: Generated services are not prefixed
  • Bug 4260: C Bindings for ws-mds
  • Bug 4694: many memory leak in web service calling
  • Bug 6246: Cannot process abstract xml schema types correctly
  • Bug 2195: globus_extension API changes
  • Bug 4714: OldValue is always null

6. Technology dependencies

C WS Core depends on the following GT components:

  • C Common Libraries
  • Non-WS Authentication and Authorization (GSI)
  • Globus XIO (used by C WS core for efficient HTTP and TCP transport)

C WS Core depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • Libxml2 (used by C WS Core for SOAP XML parsing and WSDL parsing)
  • OpenSSL (used by C WS Core for Security)
  • JavaScript (used by C WS Core as a template language to generate the C bindings from WSDL schemas)

7. Tested platforms

Tested Platforms for C WS Core:

  • IA32/Linux/gcc32
  • IA64/Linux/gcc64
  • x86_64/Linux/gcc64
  • SPARC/Solaris 9/vendorcc32
  • PowerPC/AIX 5.2/vendorcc32
  • Mac/OS X/gcc32

8. Backward compatibility summary

Protocol changes since GT version 4.2.0:

  • SOAP messages conform to WSRF schemas instead of previous OGSI/OGSA schemas.
  • WS-Addressing has been added to the list of supported standards, as defined by the WS-Resource Framework.
  • HTTP/1.1 with 'chunked' transfer encoding is used by default.

API changes since GT version 4.2.0:

  • The 3.2 cbindings API is obsolete, with no overlap to the new API. Bindings APIs are now generated directly from WSDL.
  • The underlying XML/SOAP messaging framework is also new, based on the libxml2 pull parser API.

Schema changes since GT version 4.2.0:

  • Schemas are completely new. The WS C Core implements the OASIS WSRF and WSN working drafts specifications (with minor fixes to the 1.2-draft-01 published schemas and with the March 2004 version of the WS-Addressing specification.)

10. For More Information

See C WS Core for more information about this component.