Web Services for Devices

The WS4D group developed an alternative security profile for DPWS, the WS4D Security Profile. Its purpose is to enable mobile devices – such as smart phones or netbooks – to securely communicate over DPWS. An implementation in alpha state as well as documentation on how to secure your applications is available in the WS4D-gSOAP trunk. The highlights are

• direct authentication between devices (no authentication server, no certificate authorities)
• highly flexible authorization subsystem
• in nearest future: fine-grained configuration of security constraints

Of course, we provide an additional version of the well-known air conditioner example – this time using the security profile’s implementation. Check it out!

We are back  from the OASIS WS-DD interop / face-to-face meeting and the CeBIT IT exhibition in Hannover.

During the WS-DD meetings (23.-26.2. hosted by Canon at their Santa Ana, CA campus) we tested the security part of DPWS with our ws4d-gsoap toolkit. The changes will be part of a new release described later. During the face-to-face we continued the standardization work to accomplish the version 1.1 of DPWS, WS-Discovery and SOAP-over-UDP specifications until June. As you can see on the issue list, most issues are solved. So the deadline at June looks good.

During the CeBIT exhibition in Hannover we introduced our new and easy to use composition tool to create new applications in device scenarios. This time our main focus was the health care scenario. Our compositione tool called pipes attracted a lot of attention. We plan to release this tool as open source soon, so you can connect your DPWS capable devices with each other, with regular web services, web 2.0 services or even other devices that don’t support DPWS!

Apart from that we look for new application domains of DPWS. One such new application domain is distributed OSGi. So we are developing an integration of our java multi edition stack (JMEDS) into OSGi. It can be used to distribute the services of an OSGi plattform, use OSGi services with DPWS clients and integrate DPWS devices into OSGi. We are planning to release this extension soon.

To sum up our plans for the near future:

• Release version 0.8 and 0.7.1 of ws4d-gsoap. Version 0.8 supports the latest version of the WS-DD specifications and has new features like DPWS security support, scope matching support, lwIP support, fixed interoperability issues with vista and windows 7 and maybe RTnet support. Version 0.7 simply fixes basic bugs related to the build system.
• Release ws4d-pipes
• Release OSGi integration for JMEDS

The first open source release of the WS4D-gSOAP toolkit is available. The toolkit is hosted at http://trac.e-technik.uni-rostock.de/projects/ws4d-gsoap. You can download the toolkit at the WS4D-gSOAP download page. We are accepting patches! If you have patches or suggestions, please contact us at info[at]ws4d.org and add “WS4D-gSOAP” to the subject.