Indigo
Microsoft's Indigo Ascend Program
Microsoft's Indigo Ascend Program provides Microsoft's certified partners and enterprise customers with early access to the next generation programming platform: Indigo. Indigo will make possible a new wave of connected systems based on the open Web services standards. The program allows Enterprise architects designing custom applications for large companies or Independent Software Vendors writing packaged applications targeting vertical or horizontal markets to gain a head start in adopting this important technology.
Stromboli has been formally accepted into the Ascend Program gaining technical information, access to pre-release code, hands-on Labs and support from Microsoft experts. Stromboli were selected from a large pool of applicants because Microsoft believes that, together with the other Ascend participants, we will provide them with the feedback necessary to help them to move the industry onto the Indigo platform. Stromboli develops and hosts connected systems built on Indigo's predessor: Web services enhancements 2 (WSE 2).
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The Unified Programming Model for Building Service-Oriented Applications
Connections between system are now more important than ever before. Since 1995, the number of Internet connections has risen from 25 million to over 500 million, the number of Websites from 200,000 to ten million, and B2B e-commerce has gown from less than £50 million in annually to over £700 million. This growth in connectivity, combined with the ongoing need for the integration of heterogeneous systems, has driven the adoption of XML Web services, in which applications communicate with each other over the web using a set of well defined standards. The adoption of Web services is enabling new connected software scenarios within and between organizations, across vertical industries, and increasingly in the consumer market.
Yet today’s Web services technologies such as ASMX and WSE 2 are just the first step to realizing the true potential of the connected software applications called "Connected Systems". While basic Web services provide the foundation for interoperability and integration, connected systems also demand secure and reliable communication based on standards and these requirements can be costly and difficult to meet.
Indigo, Microsoft’s next generation Web services technology, helps developers and organizations overcome these challenges, both within and beyond the enterprise. Indigo takes Web services to the next level by providing developers with a highly productive framework for building secure, reliable and interoperable applications. It extends the second generation of the Microsoft .NET Framework with additional functionality, enabling Stromboli to build connected systems using Visual Studios, the best-of-breed programming tools. This approach results in less complexity, fewer components to be maintained and significant cost savings for the customer.
Indigo will radically simplify how the next generation of connected systems is built. It accomplishes this through three architectural design goals:
- Built-in support for a broad set of Web services protocols
- Implicit use of service-oriented development principles
- A single API for building connected systems
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Broad Support for Web Services
The industry standard Web services specifications provide interoperable protocols for Security, Reliable Messaging and Transactions in loosely coupled systems. The specifications build on top of the core XML and SOAP standards.
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Today’s Web services technologies provide support for basic interoperability between applications running on different platforms, such as Windows. Linux and Unix. However, most of these technologies lack the ability to achieve this interoperability with guarantees for end-to-end security and reliable communication. Indigo delivers secure, reliable, transactional interoperability through built-in support for the Web services specifications. This drastically reduces the amount of code required to achieve interoperability amoungst heterogeneous systems. For businesses, it means the ability to interact with customers, partners, and suppliers both within and beyond the organization, regardless of the platforms they use.
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Service-Oriented Design
For years, developers and organizations have struggled to build software that adapts at the speed of business. Service-oriented development principles help overcome this challenge with architectural best practices for building highly adaptable software. Indigo is the first programming model built from the ground up to provide service-oriented application development for modern Service-oriented architectures (SOA). This enables Stromboli to build autonomous services that can be orchestrated to support business processes, thereby increasing the potential to flexibly map changes in business processes and reducing long term upgrade and maintenance costs. For businesses, this facilitates an IT infrastructure that is responsive to business change and cheaper to manage over time.
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Explicit Support for Service-Oriented Architecture
The basic idea in developing for a Service-oriented architecture is that applications provide and consume services. What is new in Indigo is a clear focus on services as distinct from objects. Toward this end, Indigo's design is based on four key principles:
- Share schema, not class: unlike older distributed object technologies, services interact with their clients only through a well-defined XML interface.
- Behaviors such as passing complete classes, methods and all, across service boundaries aren't allowed.
Services are autonomous: a service and its clients agree on the interface between them, but are otherwise independent. They may be written in different languages, use different runtime environments, such as the CLR and the Java Virtual Machine, execute on different operating systems, and differ in other ways.
- Boundaries are explicit: a goal of distributed object technologies such as Distributed COM (DCOM) was to make remote objects look as much as possible like local objects. While this approach simplified development in some ways by providing a common programming model, it also hid the inescapable differences between local objects and remote objects. Services avoid this problem by making interactions between services and their clients more explicit.
- Hiding distribution is not a goal.
Use policy-based compatibility: when possible, determining which options to use between systems should rely on WS-Policy-based mechanisms.
Service-orientation is a broad area, encompassing service-oriented applications and the more general concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Indigo will be the foundation for service-oriented applications built on Windows, and so it will be fundamental to the SOA efforts of many organizations.
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Unified Programming Model
Developers have had to use multiple technologies to build connected systems. This has made it difficult to combine functionality from the different technologies into a single solution. Indigo provides the first unified API for developing all classes of connected systems. It combines and extends the functionality of existing Microsoft technologies to deliver a single, highly-productive development framework that improves developer productivity and reduces time to market. Best of all, this programming model is built on the industry standard Web services specifications.
Indigo provides the functionality and flexibility to appeal to organizations of all sizes. It can be used to build connected systems that run within the context of a single machine, across a company, or spanning an industry. It addresses a broad spectrum of scenarios, from connected line of business and vertical applications to consumer applications such as Internet banking. In addition to extending the functionality of the .NET Framework 2.0, Indigo can be used with BizTalk Server to provide both brokered (the enterprise bus model) and unbrokered application-to-application communication.
Indigo was originally planed as a component of Longhorn, the forthcoming version of Windows. However, Microsoft have now decided to extend support to the current platform of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, as well as Longhorn. This is great news, as the uptake of Indigo will be radically accelerated, simplifying the next generation of connected systems built on the Windows platform.
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