14 DAY TRIAL // With Windows 7, Microsoft is looking to provide developers with the necessary resources to build as well as integrate what the company referred to as the Web services and applications of the future. In this regard, the next iteration of the Windows client and server operating system offer extensible and manageable platforms, not only the Windows Communication Foundation but also a new set of Web Service application programming interfaces designed to be available in parallel with WCF. The Windows Web Services low-level API is set up to permit an application in Windows 7 to communicate with either another machine on a local network or remotely with a Web service.
“This API helps developers who use native C/C++ code to connect this code to web services. There is not any other solution support by Microsoft for this task and this has been very often request from developers. Alternative solution is to build WCF service and interop into native code. However the performance of such solution is pretty bad and in many cases this solution is not acceptable. This is why WWSAPI was created and it provides much better performing solution for this scenario,” said Nikola Dudar, program manager, Windows Web Services API Microsoft.
Available by default as a DLL in System32, Windows Web Service is essentially a native-code implementation of SOAP, both client- and server-side, specific of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 Server). However, Microsoft informed that it would make Windows Web Services available for earlier releases of Windows, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. However, all editions of Windows 7 and Windows Server p2008 R2 will feature the API runtime DLL out-of-the-box.
“Web services API does not replace RPC. These API target different scenarios and meet different needs. In our performance runs, RPC based solutions tend to be faster than WWSAPI based solution both on HTTP and TCP channel and binary encoding. However the performance difference between these too solutions is expected and acceptable,” Dudar added.