Blog
Articles, tutorials, and field notes on identity, integration, API management, and application security — spanning nearly two decades of hands-on work.
What is a Service Consumer?
A Service Consumer is any tier of an organization’s systems that calls web services. These services could be implemented by SOAP, REST, XML over HTTP, EJBs, JMS or MQ applications, RMI, RPC, invocation of COBOL programs on a mainframe with 3270 screen-scraping, communication over a custom TCP…
What is a Service Provider?
A Service Provider is any tier or system in an organization’s environment that hosts web services (or services of any kind).
What is an ESB?
In the past year, I have stood in a conference room at more than one client fielding a question along the lines of exactly what is an ESB? I’ve found that there is a wide variety of impressions about what exactly makes something an ESB. I’m hardly the first person to post something on the Internet…
What Is A SOAP Web Service?
A SOAP Web Service is any web service that is compliant with the SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2 specs. When referring to a SOAP Web Service we will use the capitalized Web Service. This convention is followed by most publications within the industry.
What is a Web Service? What is a web service?
This one has probably been addressed many times. But, I needed a place to link to whenever it comes up in other posts. For our purposes, a Web Service is SOAP Web Service and a web service is anything acting as a web service in the generic sense.
What Is A REST Web Service?
REST web services are not nearly as formalized as their SOAP equivalent. A REST web service adheres to the principals laid out in Roy Fielding’s PhD Thesis. REST stands for Representational State Transition.
What is an XML Gateway?
An XML Gateway is an externally-facing DMZ tier of a web services platform. Generally, this DMZ tier will be facing the Internet, but it may simply be between business units or facing a leased line connecting one entity to another. It can be implemented using a software solution (such as web…
What is an Appliance? What is a SOA Appliance?
I suppose I’m switching gears a bit here back towards something almost philosophical rather than my usual concrete technical info So be it. In the last six months, I’ve been at several clients sites that are using SOA appliances to build XML Gateway and ESB patterns. I answer quite a few client…
JVM Heap & GC Tuning…
So, obviously, I haven’t posted anything here in a while🙂. Life has been busy. Starting several months ago, I left my job of four years and began independent consulting. Among other things, this means that the variety of topics discussed on thinkmiddleware.com should be more varied. I’m also going…
IBM Announced the New XG45 DataPower appliance
This is the first post on thinkmiddleware.com where we discuss DataPower. Guess what I’ve been doing with my career lately🙂.
JBoss 4.x and DataSource Configuration
On JBoss 4.x, a MySQL datasource looks something like:
Secure Identity Propagation using WS-Trust, WS-Security, and SAML2 — IBM Impact, 2011 Session
On April 13th, 2011, Ryan Triplett and I spoke at IBM Impact in Las Vegas. The topic was “Secure Identity Propagation using WS-Trust, WS-Security, and SAML2“. The PowerPoint presentation can be found here. The original abstract: