GT 3.9.4 Component Fact Sheet: C Web Services Core (C WS Core)

Brief component overview

The C WS Core provides a basic toolset in C for creating WSRF-enabled web services and clients conforming to the WS-Resource and WS-Notification specifications.

Summary of features

  • Binding Generation:
    • Binding Generation directly from WSDL schemas
      • ANSI-C stubs and skeletons
      • Non-blocking client stubs for writing event-driven code
      • EPR (EndpointReference) encapsulation
      • WSRF enabled client stubs and services
    • HTTP/1.1 Support
    • Embeddable Service API
    • Standalone service container
    • WSRF-enabled services

    Deprecated Features

    • Dynamic Deployment (WSDD) using AxisC++ was included in an early pre-release but is no longer supported.

    Backward compatibility summary

    Protocol changes since GT version 3.2

    • SOAP messages conform to WSRF schemas instead of previous OGSI/OGSA schemas.
    • WS-Addressing has been added to the list of supported standards, as defined by the WS-Resource Framework.
    • HTTP/1.1 with 'chunked' transfer encoding is used by default.

    API changes since GT version 3.2

    • The 3.2 cbindings API is obsolete, with no overlap to the new API. Bindings APIs are now generated directly from WSDL.
    • The underlying XML/SOAP messaging framework is also new, based on the libxml2 pull parser API.

    Schema changes since GT version 3.2

    • Schemas are completely new. The WS C Core implements the OASIS WSRF and WSN working drafts specifications (with minor fixes to the 1.2-draft-01 published schemas and with the March 2004 version of the WS-Addressing specification.)

    Technology dependencies

    C WS Core depends on the following GT components:

    • C Common Libraries
    • Pre-WS Authentication and Authorization (GSI)
    • Globus XIO (used by C WS core for efficient HTTP and TCP transport)

    C WS Core depends on the following 3rd party software:

    • Libxml2 (used by C WS Core for SOAP XML parsing and WSDL parsing)
    • OpenSSL (used by C WS Core for Security)
    • JavaScript (used by C WS Core as a template language to generate the C bindings from WSDL schemas)

    Tested platforms

    Tested Platforms for C WS Core

    • Linux i386
    • Mac OS X