VW Web Services Introduction

To run the tests yourself, either visit the page, or do the following:

1. Download the testing workspace scripts
2. Load the SOAPEtc bundle from the public repository
3. Create a subdirectory (underneath your image directory) called InteropResults. All test results will be stored there as HTML
4. Open the workspace script and execute the simple tests
1. Testing simple type
2. Testing complex types as 2DArrays and nested structs and array.
3. Searching MS UDDI registry.

What these tests demonstrate is that VisualWorks 7 has full interoperability with .NET - the tests execute against the Microsoft .NET servers themselves. With .NET, the preferred method of inter-application communication is via Web Services - which VisualWorks fully supports. A Web Service implemented iin VisualWorks and available on the network will be immediately visible to .NET developers - and will be indistinguishable from a native .NET service.

Likewise, .NET services are easily discovered and accessed from VisualWorks. VisualWorks fits into the Web Services implementation of .NET as a first class citizen.

This leads to a roadmap question - if VisualWorks has first class accessibility via Web Services, does it need deeper integration with .NET? We believe that the answer is yes - there will be times that developers would like to have a Smalltalk application running in the same memory space as a .NET application, making it more easily callable - and making it easier for the Smalltalk application to call .NET services. With that in mind, the Cincom Smalltalk team is working on the following:

• Making the VM available as DLL
• This will enable linking a Smalltalk application directly with the .NET runtime - or with any other runtime, for that matter. This will make it possiible to use Smalltalk when Smalltalk is not (or cannot be) the <>center of the application
• Hooking the VM up to .NET at least at the same level as C++ - which would enable Smalltalk applications to run in the same memory space
• This will enable Smalltalk applications to become part of the .NET landscape

While the tests do not show a VW SOAP server being used against .NET clients, our engineering staff has performed such tests. We ran the following common tests using a VW Opentalk SOAP server and a variety of clients, both MS.NET and others:

1. echoString (t1)
2. echoFloat (t2)
3. echoStructArray(t3)
4. testFault1(t4)

Oracle 9iAS, webMethods Integration Server, eSOAP, OpenLink, SQLData SOAP Server, WASP Server for Java, Apache SOAP, Apache Axis, Spray, Delphi SOAP, MS .NET Remoting , kSOAP, SIM , GLUE , MS SOAP ToolKit 3.0 , 4s4c v2.0, EasySoap++, SOAP:Lite, NuSOAP, 4s4c, SOAP4R.

And responded appropriately against all clients, including the Microsoft ones.

So what does this show? It demonstrates that VisualWorks is interoperable not only with the .NET services, but with a wide range of Web Services implementations, regardless of platform or OS. We believe that this makes VisualWorks an ideal choice for offering Web Services from either the client side or the server side. The productivity of Smalltalk - see the Linea Engineering numbers - combined with full interoperability in a standards compliant fashion - makes VisualWorks a great choice!