Web services gateway - What is new in this release

 

The Web services gateway was first made available on AlphaWorks on 21 December 2001. The main differences between the AlphaWorks edition and this version are as follows:

• The gateway has been rebuilt using enterprise beans.

  A side-effect of this is that the Web services gateway now only runs in an appserver that has an EJB container. So it no longer runs in the Tomcat server.

• The gateway includes UDDI integration, so you can deploy and remove Web services to a UDDI registry as well as to a URL.

• In addition to the Apache SOAP channel, there is now also a SOAP/HTTP channel.

• The SOAP/HTTP channel supports
  • SOAP messages with attachments.
  • RPC style and Document style SOAP message formats.

• The gateway supports bidirectional interactions (that is, both inbound and outbound requests) directly, by deploying two instances of each type of channel.

  To achieve this configuration with the AlphaWorks version, you had to deploy two instances of the Web services gateway; one for inbound communication and one for outbound communication.

• Interceptors have been renamed as filters.

• Channels, filters and UDDI references are deployed to the Web services gateway, then associated with individual Web services. So when you configure a Web service, you choose the following entities:
  • The channels on which it is available.
  • The filters (if any) which apply to it.
  • The UDDI references (if any) to which it is deployed.

• One can change the channels, filters and UDDI references that are associated with a deployed service without having to remove the service.

• One can deploy multiple targets for a single service (that is, more than one implementation of a service that has the same service interface).

• One can back up and restore a gateway configuration.

• One can create a gateway cluster (for example for load balancing).

• One can configure the gateway for secure transmission of SOAP messages using tokens, keys, signatures and encryption in accordance with the emerging  
   
  Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification.

• One can set security (basic authorization) on the individual methods of a Web service, and for the gateway as a whole.

• The gateway can invoke Web services over HTTPS.

• One can configure the gateway to work with authenticating proxies.