Dennis Sosnoski

Who is Dennis Sosnoski?

I'm a Java™ and XML developer working primarily with Web services issues. Through my company, I provide a range of training, mentoring, and consulting services to clients around the world. I also participate in a number of open source projects (including JiBX XML data binding and Apache Axis2 Web services) write articles, and give presentations for conferences and organizations worldwide. You can see some of my upcoming and recent activities highlighted below.

Axis2 Training Courses

The Axis2 training course has been a continuing favorite with clients, and is now being offered as anything from a two-day quick introduction to a five-day intensive workshop that gets development teams fully qualified on all major aspects of Axis2 web services. If your organization is planning projects based on Axis2 you'll find the training makes a huge difference in developer productivity. Naturally, I'm also able to provide in-depth coverage of both JiBX and alternative data binding frameworks, either as part of an Axis2 class as an independent event.

Want some samples of the course material? My IBM® developerWorks® Java Web Services series uses material taken directly from the Axis2 training class, including the data binding comparison code used in the Axis2 Data Binding article and the WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, and WS-SecureConversation examples in Axis2 WS-Security basics, Axis2 WS-Security signing and encryption, and The high cost of (WS-)Security.

I'm in the U.S. during July and early August for training and consulting, then in late August will be returning to Australia/New Zealand. Contact me to find out more about the course and to check scheduling for your organization.

Articles

My "Java Web services" column for IBM developerWorks is back in full swing, with new articles coming out monthly. The three Axis2-related articles mentioned above are the latest installments: Axis2 WS-Security basics, Axis2 WS-Security signing and encryption, and The high cost of (WS-)Security. Even if you're not interested in working with Axis2 you may want to check out the last article, which gives some startling figures for WS-Security performance... figures which are more-or-less representative of the current state of WS-Security across a range of frameworks.

The IBM developerWorks tutorials on JiBX 1.2 are also live: JiBX 1.2, Part 1: Java code to XML schema and JiBX 1.2, Part 2: XML schema to Java code. JiBX 1.2 offers some exciting innovations, especially in the area of code generation from schema (ever try to work with the classes generated from a set of 240 schemas, when you only need to support one particular document? JiBX 1.2 can help!) and these tutorials provide an in-depth introduction to these new features.

My latest InfoQ article is Schema for Web Services - Part I: Basic Datatypes. This is the first in a multipart series covering many of the practical issues involved in using XML Schema with web services. It's based on my years of work in helping clients come up with solid web service designs, and hopefully will help people avoid many of the common problems in this area.

Projects

JiBX 1.2.1 is available for download, with a new JiBX 1.2.2 release coming out in July. The 1.2.2 release includes a number of fixes for problems encountered in code generation from an ever-increasing range of schemas. I'll also add links to the Sponsors page, for organizations which paid for some of the 1.2 work. Interested in seeing some new features for your own needs, or want to help move the JiBX 2.0 work into production? Email me to find out how your organization can become a sponsor.

JiBX/WS is also now available, as a 0.9 release (from the same download page as the main JiBX distribution). Nigel Charman and I are excited to have JiBX/WS to this point, and plan to push it through to a 1.0 release soon. JiBX/WS already offers blazingly fast POX and SOAP web services, especially when using the included XBIS XML encoding over the connection between client and server. How fast? Well, the title of the talk mentioned in the "Presentations" section, below, should give you a good idea...

Last year I had the opportunity to develop an open source tool for the New Zealand Ministry of Education, now available on Sourceforge as the WS-Security Wrapper project. This tool acts as an intermediary for linking simple XML-based applications to web services using WS-Security. The particular implementation used for the Ministry of Education project connects to services running the non-standard WSE 2.0 .NET implementation of WS-Security, but it can easily be modified to work with other platforms as well. The latest version (2.0) offers both added features and security option configuration support, and will be available for download from the Sourceforge site soon.

Presentations

My most recent public presentation was a JiBX and JiBX/WS talk to the Auckland Java Users Group on February 12, 2009: The World's Fastest Web Services. You can download the slides here. Ubergeek Peter Harrison taped the presentation, and then condensed it down to a 10-minute YouTube version including some of the demos and a discussion of benchmark tests comparing JiBX/WS performance with Axis2 and RMI, both when running locally and when running over the Internet.

About this site

The links in the column to the left lead to other pages within the "about me" part of the site, while the links in the header row below the page title and logo lead to other portions of the site.