Before you begin

1. Feature summary

New Features in the GT 4.1.3 release

  • Implementation of the 2004/06 OASIS WS-ServiceGroup working draft specification as an API and a service operation provider. Added support for service-side WSN.
  • Command-line tools for accessing WSRF operations (WSN, WSRP, WSRL).

Other Supported Features

  • Implementation of the 2004/06 OASIS WSRF and WSN (client) working draft specifications. Implementation of the March 2004 version of the WS-Addressing specification).
  • SOAP transport over HTTP/1.1 for clients and services.
  • Embeddable service engine with dynamic loading of service code.
  • Automatic generation of ANSI-C stubs and service skeletons from Document/Literal WSDL schema and XML schema documents.

Deprecated Features

  • None

2. Tested platforms

Tested Platforms for C WS Core

  • IA32/Linux/gcc32
  • IA64/Linux/gcc64
  • x86_64/Linux/gcc64
  • SPARC/Solaris 9/vendorcc32
  • PowerPC/AIX 5.2/vendorcc32
  • Mac/OS X/gcc32

3. Backward compatibility summary

Protocol changes since GT version 4.0.5

  • 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 4.0.5

  • The 3.2 cbindings API is obsolete, with no overlap to the new API.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 4.0.5

  • 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.)

4. 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)

5. Security considerations

C WS-Core supports secure transport (https) and secure message (just X509 signing, not encryption).

5.1. Secure Transport

With secure transport, the entire container must be run over an https transport. This is done by default for the C container. If the user does not want security in the container, or wants to use secure message instead of secure transport, they should use the -nosec argument to globus-wsc-container.

For clients, the secure transport is enabled if the contact URI contains the 'https' scheme instead of 'http', so the client doesn't have to enable or disable it explicitly.