Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Apache Axis 1.0 Ships! Yesterday was a big day for web services infrastructure. Apache Axis 1.0 officially shipped, marking years of incredible dedication and hard work from engineers around the world committed to delivering a very high-quality, open source SOAP web services development and deployment platform. I'm particular excited because Macromedia has been a huge contributor to and sponsor of this project (with IBM and many other individuals), and is really rewarding to see momentum building for an open and freely available implementaton of these crucial XML protocols. Thanks to Glen Daniels and Tom Jordahl (Macromedians) for their awesome work on this, and their committment to interoperable distributed computing. If you'd like to try building and deploying SOAP web services with Axis, you can just download ColdFusion MX or JRun4, both of which include commercially tested Axis implementations. 10:33:06 PM    comment []

Reliable Web Services Jon Udell and InfoWorld have a nice piece about the growing trend in layering SOAP over traditional messaging infrastructure, providing much needed reliability for loosely coupled applications. I'm interested in the issue of reliable data and message delivery for web services, but with an eye towards client-side applications talking to distributed services. It's something Macromedia has thought about a good bit, with particular attention towards the relationship between our rich client environment (Flash) and disconnected or occasionally connected client applications. The latest Flash Player (6) implements an asynchronous messaging model using ECMAScript (ActionScript) over a real-time protocol (RTMP), and provides a means for synchronization of data even when one or more clients is disconnected. While this model is right now tied exclusively to the Flash Communication Server MX and RTMP, it seems apparent that the world of reliable web services will increasingly mesh with Flash. 10:27:09 PM    comment []