How WSIT Relates to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Web services interoperability is an initiative of Sun and Microsoft. The goal is to produce web services consumers and producers that support platform independence, and then to test and deliver products to market that interoperate across different platforms.

WSIT is the product of Sun’s web services interoperability initiative. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building connected systems. WCF, which is now available as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 product, includes application programming interfaces (APIs) for building secure, reliable, transacted web services that interoperate with non-Microsoft platforms.

In a joint effort, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are testing WSIT against WCF to ensure that Sun web service clients (consumers) and web services (producers) do in fact interoperate with WCF web services applications and vice versa. The testing will ensure that the following interoperability goals are realized:

• WSIT web services clients can access and consume WCF web services.

• WCF web services clients can access and consume WSIT web services.

Sun is building WSIT on the Java platform and Microsoft is building WCF on the .NET 3.0 platform. The sections that follow describe the web services specifications implemented by Sun Microsystems in Web Services Interoperability Technologies (WSIT) and provide high-level descriptions of how each WSIT technology works.

Because WSIT-based clients and services are interoperable, you can gain the benefits of WSIT without using WCF.