Testing WS-RM Interoperability
The ultimate goal of WS-* protocols is without any doubt interoperability. Companies that have a vested interest in the success of WS-* protocols go to great lenghts to ensure these open standards are truly interoperable in practice, and not just on paper. More often than not, vagueness, sometimes purposeful and sometimes unintentional, has far-reaching undesirable consequences on interoperability - despite the fact everyone agreed on and signed off on the specification, interpretations of it and thus its implementations will differ. To avoid this, companies implementing WS-* protocols will usually do one of the following to facilitate interop testing during product development and onward:
- Attend a WS-* interoperability workshop. At such an event, interested companies come together bringing their unreleased implementations of given WS-* protocols together with basic applications called workshop scenarios. These applications conform to previously agreed to contracts and exercise a given protocol to a certain degree, typically the degree to which interoperability is desired at that point in time. What follows is days of non-stop face-to-face interop testing: every company announces the addresses at which its endpoints are listening and begins running its clients against the endpoints of others. Spec and implementation bugs are found, issues are raised, and the goal of seamless interoperability becomes that much more of a reality.
- Host online endpoints. A company with a desire to do online interop testing would expose the same service endpoints and client applications that it did or would have at the workshop on a publicly accessible server on the Internet. It would then announce the existence of these endpoints and encourage others to test against them. From then on, at their convenience and as often as necessary, companies hit each other's endpoints with each other's clients to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Microsoft has its WS-RM endpoints available online, as well. They are located at http://131.107.153.195/SecureReliableMessaging.Latest/ReliableOneWay.svc, http://131.107.153.195/SecureReliableMessaging.Latest/ReliableOneWayDual.svc, and http://131.107.153.195/SecureReliableMessaging.Latest/ReliableRequestReplyDual.svc. The client application is at http://131.107.153.195/RM.Latest/RMClient.asmx. Feel free to send any questions regarding WS-RM interop, the workshop scenarios, or our endpoints my way!
