Iona, Microsoft Test Web Services Interoperability

Iona Corp. and Microsoft Corp. will host a two-day forum this week to test interoperability in Web services offerings from various vendors.

The tests, which are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, will look at WSDL (Web Services Description Language) interoperability between SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)-based Web services toolkits.

Joining IONA and Microsoft in the tests, which the principals are calling the Web Services Interoperability Forum, Round III, will be several members of the recently formed Web Services Interoperability Organization, or WS-I. WS-I members participating in the two-day forum at Ionas Waltham, Mass., headquarters include BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp., Cape Clear, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Macromedia Inc. and Oracle Corp. Other companies involved include Rogue Wave, Software AG, Systinet and Zolera Systems.

Iona said the earlier rounds of its Web services interoperability forum tested how clients could consume WSDL from different servers. However, this round is to test compatibility and interoperability of a range of Web service client and server to process the same WSDL definitions.

Iona said that in this round of testing, engineers from the various participants will use a test suite to test interoperability between various WSDL and SOAP toolkits. The participants also will set an agenda and time for the next round of testing, as well as come up with a roadmap for product compliance to new releases of the WSDL and SOAP specifications, the company said. The group also plans to weigh its WSDL interoperability testing with that of the WS-I and the Worldwide Web Consortiums (W3C) WSDL Working Group.

“Solving the integration imperative is a key component in unlocking the value of XML Web services,” Philip DesAutels, product manager for XML Web services at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, said in a statement.