 | Level: Advanced Contributors: IBM 27 Oct 2005 Recently, IBM made a member submission to the W3C of a new specification, Web Services Polling (WS-Polling) that addresses how to handle firewalls for environments that require connections between SOAP endpoints and asynchronous processing without interference.
The WS-Polling specification is aimed at addressing a problem with Web services that appears to be popping up in quite a few places. In environments where connections between SOAP endpoints can be freely created, asynchronous message processing can be done without any problems. However, this isn't always the situation. Firewalls must be in place to protect your company's assets. This is where this new specfication comes in. WS-Polling tries to help address this issue in a non-application, non-domain, -specific way. Several specifications and standards bodies, including WS-Notification, WS-Distributed Management, WS-Management and WS-Addressing, are all experimenting with the idea of how to allow an endpoint that cannot receive new asynchronous connections to still get messages delivered to it. While each one of these groups is looking at the issue, each appears to be solving it with a very specific domain in mind. WS-Polling attempts to solve the problem with a broader vision -- hoping to allow a single solution that can be reused by all of these other organizations. By doing this, it would allow the functionality proposed in WS-Polling to be pushed into the 'core' SOAP engine, freeing these higher-level specifications to work on their domain and application-specific features.
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