1. Glenn Wasson University of Virginia
GGF 16 InteropFest BoF
Glenn Wasson
University of Virginia

2. InteropFests In Which We Participated
WSRF / WSN InteropFests
2003 at IBM, Raleigh, NC
2005? via the web
Based around scenario documents
Running example that involves specs messages

3. InteropFests In Which We Participated
First was a kick-off to the OASIS WGs
“Show of support” in the formation of the WGs
Roughly a dozen independent implementations (in various states)
Equal mix of industry and academia/government
Second was pre-public comment testing
Last check before “release”
6 (ish) implementations
75% / 25% industry to academia/government

4. First InteropFest “Developers in a room” variety What was interesting?
Scenario document described specific tests
Matrix of check boxes
What was interesting?
Understanding of time (.NET could parse lots of serializations of time, but only generate one)
Have to push this back in the spec (i.e. you must accept time in the following formats)
Small changes in messages can require large changes in infrastructure

5. Second InteropFest Remote “Publish your URLs” variety
Again, had scenario document
More disconnected / Less frenetic coding
What was interesting?
Harder to test clients
Theory → everyone tests their own clients against your service
Practice → it’s easier to run everyone else’s clients against your service

6. Lessons? Dev-in-room more productive per unit time
Typical F2F vs. telecon trade-offs
Spec-wise legal WSDL / XSD ≠ Good
Without tooling support, forget it
Interop tests can find these issues
Easy to get caught in “client/service on same platform” trap
Spec changes can come out of interop tests!
This is what we want… but spec authors can resist…
We might have worked really hard to get out conformant messages, but for a spec to fly, you have to have many impls and most people are not going to impl a spec if the tools don’t support it