GT 4.1.1 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 4.1.1 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. Changes Summary

The following changes have occurred for C WS Core since the last stable release, 4.0.4:

  • Implementation of WS-ServiceGroup as an API and a provider.
  • Implementation of the Notification Producer operations, including support for Simple, Concrete, and Full TopicExpressions. The default service stubs will use a provider for this.
  • Implementation of the WSRF QueryResourceProperties operation, including client and server-side serialization of XPath expressions. Support for TargetedXPathQuery dialect as used by Java WS Core.
  • Local service invocations within a process bypass XML serialization.
  • Improved WSDL parsing and type generation (support nillable types, xsd:token, etc).
  • New command-line option parsing support in WSRF Core tools for implementing WSRF client programs.
  • New command-line tools for common WSRF operations.
  • Improved Makefiles for bindings packages created by globus-wsrf-cgen. Source lists are created at compile time from the schema, instead of being hard-coded into the Makefiles. Better handling of service-only, client-only, and types-only packages.

5. Known Problems

The following problems and limitations are known to exist for C WS Core at the time of the 4.1.1 release:

5.1. Limitations

  • [list limitations]

6. Technology Dependencies

C WS Core depends on the following GT components:

  • C Common Libraries
  • Pre-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. Supported 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 4.0.4

  • 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 4.0.4

  • 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 4.0.4

  • 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.)

9. Associated Standards

Associated standards for C WS Core:

  • HTTP
  • SOAP
  • XML Schema
  • WSDL
  • WS Security
  • WS-Addressing
  • WS-Resource Framework
  • WS-Notification

10. For More Information

See C WS Core for more information about this component.