For this reason, the portion of the
Identity Metasystem already in place today is largely based on
web services.
Web services can
get the job done
The pluralism
dilemma was already
dealt with by
web services
138 Hints Toward a Solution
In this section, we take a short break from identity and dedicate
some time to understanding web services as a phenomenon and
as a technology. We position them in the IT landscape and revisit
basic principles, terminology, and the aspects more relevant
to identity. After we cover the essentials, you will see how the
various components of the Identity Metasystem are concretely
implemented via advanced web services.
The WS-* Speci?¬?cations
Developing distributed systems has always been one of the dif?¬?-
cult problems of the IT industry. A piece of software that tries to
communicate with another software entity across networks or
other boundaries needs to address a number of problems. How
do we route information to the destination? Which technique
should be used for pumping data across the network? Which
data format should be used? How do we ensure that the communication
is secure and reliable? How do we guarantee that
the communication happens in transactional fashion?
The standard way of dealing with those problems was represented
by imposing on the designers the need to have complete
knowledge of every node of the architecture.
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