WS-I Basic Profile

Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile promote interoperability. WebSphere Application Server conforms to...

• WS-I Basic Profile Version 1.1
• WS-I Basic Security Profile Version 1.0

Web service components, including messaging, description, discovery, and security, are by specifications...

• SOAP 1.1
• XML 1.0
• HTTP 1.1
• WSDL 1.1
• UDDI

WS-I Basic Profile...

• How these technology components are used together to achieve interoperability
• Mandates specific use of each of the technologies when appropriate

Available WS-I profiles include...

• WS-I Basic Profile V1.2 adds support for WS-Addressing (WS-A) and SOAP MTOM.
• WS-Addressing enables asynchronous message exchange pattern, decoupling the service request from the service response. The SOAP header of the sender's request contains the wsa:ReplyTo value that defines the endpoint reference to which the provider's response is sent. Decoupling the request from the response enables long running web services interactions. Leveraging the asynchronous programming model support in JAX-WS Version 2.1 in combination with WS-Addressing, we can now take advantage of the ability to create web services invocations where the client can continue to process work without waiting for a response to return.

  Using MTOM, we can send and receive binary data optimally within a SOAP message.

• WS-I Basic Profile V2.0 added support for SOAP 1.2.

• WS-I Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 added support for...
  • WS-Reliable Messaging 1.1
  • WS-Make Connection 1.0
  • WS-Secure Conversation 1.3

• WS-Reliable Messaging 1.1 is a session-based protocol that provides message level reliability for web services interactions. WS-Make Connection 1.0 was developed by the WS-Reliable Messaging workgroup to address scenarios where a web services endpoint is behind a firewall or the endpoint has no visible endpoint reference. If a web services endpoint loses connectivity during a reliable session,

• WS-Make Connection provides efficient methods to re-establish reliable sessions.

• WS-Secure Conversation V1.3 is a session-based security protocol that uses an efficient symmetric key based encryption algorithm for message level security.

• WS-I Reliable Secure Profile V1.0 provides secure reliable session-oriented web services interactions.

Universal Transformation Format (UTF)-16 encoding

Uses 16-bit values to store Universal Character Set (UCS) characters. UTF-8 is the most common encoding used on the Internet; UTF-16 encoding is typically used for Java and Windows product applications; and UTF-32 is used by various Linux and UNIX systems. Unlike UTF-8, UTF-16 has issues with big-endian and little-endian, and often involves Byte Order Mark (BOM) to indicate the endian. BOM is mandatory for UTF-16 encoding and it can be used in UTF-8.

Universal Transformation Format (UTF)-16 encoding, required by WS-I Basic Profile, uses 16-bit values to store Universal Character Set (UCS) characters. UTF-8 is the most common encoding used on the Internet; UTF-16 encoding is typically used for Java and Windows product applications; and UTF-32 is used by various Linux and UNIX systems. Unlike UTF-8, UTF-16 has issues with big-endian and little-endian, and often involves Byte Order Mark (BOM) to indicate the endian. BOM is mandatory for UTF-16 encoding and it can be used in UTF-8.

WAS v8.5.5 supports UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding of SOAP messages.

Bytes	Encoding form
EF BB BF	UTF-8
FF FE	UTF-16, little-endian
FE FF	UTF-16, big-endian
00 00 FE FF	UTF-32, big-endian
FF FE 00 00	UTF-32, little-endian

BOM is written prior to the XML text, and indicates to the parser how the XML is encoded. The XML declaration contains the encoding, for example:

<?xml version=xxx encoding="utf-xxx"?>

BOM is used with the encoding to determine how to interpret the XML.

POST http://www.whitemesa.net/soap12/add-test-rpc HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-16; action=""
SOAPAction:
Host: localhost: 8080
Content-Length: 562
 OxFF0xFE<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
 <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/soap-envelope"
               xmlns:soapenc="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/soap-encoding
               xmlns:tns="http://whitemesa.net/wsdl/soap12-test"
               xmlns:types="http://whitemesa.net/wsdl/soap12-test/encodedTypes"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
   <soap:Body>
    <q1:echoString xmlns:q1="http://soapinterop.org/">
       <inputString soap:encodingStyle="http://example.org/unknownEncoding" xsi:type="xsd:string">
        Hello SOAP 1.2
      </inputString>
     </q1:echoString>
   </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

In the example code, 0xFF0xFE represents the byte codes, while the <?xml> declaration is the textual representation.

Support for styleEncoding is not supported in SOAP 1.2. Here is the same example of the SOAP message but without the encoding information:

OxFF0xFE<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
 <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/soap-envelope"
               xmlns:soapenc="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/soap-encoding
               xmlns:tns="http://whitemesa.net/wsdl/soap12-test"
               xmlns:types="http://whitemesa.net/wsdl/soap12-test/encodedTypes"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
   <soap:Body>
    <q1:echoString xmlns:q1="http://soapinterop.org/">
      <inputString xsi:type="xsd:string">
        Hello SOAP 1.2
      </inputString>
    </q1:echoString>
  </soap:Body>
 </soap:Envelope>

Related concepts

Differences in SOAP versions

Web Services Addressing support

Basic Security Profile compliance tips

What is new for securing web services

Change SOAP message encoding to support WSI-Basic Profile

Enable MTOM for JAX-WS web services

Web services specifications and APIs