Systinet Corp. on Thursday is making generally available WASP Server for Java 4.6, the company’s Web Services infrastructure platform, featuring improved security.
The product provides a platform for developing, running, and managing Web services applications. The company further describes WASP as a solution for IT professionals and ISVs needing a lightweight, embeddable Web Services runtime for Java or J2EE applications.
Version 4.6 adds backing for the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) WS-Security specification and is compatible with all implementations of WS-Security, according to Systinet.
WS-Security enables users to protect the contents of a Web Services or XML message, said Charlie Ungashick, senior director of marketing at Systinet in Cambridge, Mass.
“That capability was not available (in the product) before. Users were reliant on the transport mechanism to provide security or privacy of the message,” Ungashick said. The product also features security enhancements, such as alerting, in the event a message cannot be decrypted or authentication failed, Systinet said.
Also included in the new version is enhanced support for asynchronous Web Services, support for the newly released SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) 1.2 specification, and backing for Java Web services APIs, including JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-Based Remote Procedure Calls), JAXM (Java API for XML Messaging), and SAAJ (SOAP with Attachments API for Java).
“Asynchronous messaging allows you to guarantee that a message is being received by the server,” Ungashick said.
The mechanism enables Web Services to be called asynchronously and eliminates the need for developers to write client code for polling a Web Service, the company said. With synchronous Web Services, on the other hand, a client sends a message to a server, and it is halted until a response is received, which Systinet said becomes unworkable especially for complex computations or multipart tasks.
WASP also features transport-level asynchronous messaging, which relies on different transport channels for the request and response message, such as an HTTP request or an e-mail response.
The product supports MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) and DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation) encoding of SOAP attachments.
Web Services for WASP can be built with Java development environments such as Borland Software Corp.’s JBuilder, Eclipse, or IBM Corp.’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer. The product also can interact with Microsoft Corp.’s .Net systems.
Although Wasp Server for Java can be downloaded for free, it may only be used for development and testing. Deployment costs begin at US$2,000 per CPU.
