Windows Web Services

Haven't watched the video yet, but another services API?  Why isn't Microsoft standing behind their products?  WPF is almost never used, and now WCF is getting pushed aside.

If this is low level enough will this be a replacement for RPC (even for IPC on the same box)?

Given that RPC is using binary data to communicate, I assume that Windows WS API (based on XML) is slower than RPC. How much slower?

-Vasile

If there is a possibility iIt would be nice if MS opens this stack as an open source project.  AFAIK there is no good  open source native web services API. The community will benefit greatly.

Reminded me of SOAP toolkit. Will this be available downlevel?

It is good to have an unmanaged choice of WCF stack

Ibrahim [ http://blogs.msdn.com/ibrahim/  ]

Is this just a client API or is going to be a server side API to actually create Web Services? And if there is a server side API what is the relation to Http API?

George.

Hello everyone,

First, I am sorry for a delay in the reply. I will try to address your comments one by one. Please feel free to ask more questions. I would be happy to answer them for you.

• Why another API?
  • This API helps developers who use native C/C++ code  to connect this code to web services. There is not any other solution support by Microsoft for this task and this has been very often request from developers. Alternative solution is to build WCF service and interop into native code. However the performance of such solution is pretty bad and in many cases this solution is not acceptable. This is why WWSAPI was created and it provides much better performing solution for this scenario.
• Will this API replace RPC? How it compares to RPC?
  • No, WEb services API does not replace RPC. These API target different scenarios and meet different needs. In our performance runs, RPC based solutions tend to be faster than WWSAPI  based solution both on HTTP and TCP channel and binary encoding. However the performance difference between these too solutions is expected and acceptable.
• Open this project as open source project?
  • There are no plans of opening the source code of this API.
• Will API available down level?
  • Yes, our plan to make this API available down level to Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 pre-R2. The API runtime DLL will be installed on on all flavors of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 out of the box .
• Is this just client API or is there server side also?
  • There are both client and server side APIs and it is possible to build both clients to web services and web services.
• What is the relation of a server side of the API to Http API?
  • Not sure what this question is about exactly. If service is set to use HTTP channel binding, the implementation of Web Services API is going to use Http.sys, however developer does not need to use http.sys directly.

I hope this reply answers your questions. Please feel free to ask more. You may also use contact form from my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolad/ to contact me offline later on.

Thanks,
Nikola

How does WWSAPI compare with other 3rd party solutions like gSOAP? We are currently using gSOAP to have our C++ clients talk to our WCF services. What benefits would we see in switching to WWSAPI?

I know this is the last thing anyone wants to hear... but how about a COM wrapper and WSDL compiler for VB6?  .Net Interop is a clunky and expensive alternative, and WWSAPI adoption rates might climb radically with such an enhancement.

I won't hold my breath.

Re: gSOAP
If you are using gSOAP today on Windows to talk to web services or build a web service in native code, you should be able to switch to use WWSAPI right away. Give a try and if you see any issues or have comments, please let us know using forums, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/wwsapi/threads/

Re: VB6
Thanks for bringing this scenario to our attention. In design of the API, we have focused on C/C++ developers. You are right that it should be possible to build COM wrapper around the API to make it available to VB6. This can be an interesting CodePlex project useful for many VB6 developers. As for out of the box support for VB6, this is not in our plans at this moment.

Thanks,
Nikola

When will the downlevel support for WebServices.dll become available? This is a great technology for unmanaged code worlds that need to be brought into the arena of Web Services. I would like to be able to make plans for the Win2k3 support - How soon can we count on this? Many of the platforms where this will be the most useful are NOT new servers or workstations - they are older boxes with legacy OS installed.

 

Supporting this only on Win7 and Win2K8r2 is somewhat anti-thematic. When can we expect the downlevel support???