Indigo, unveiled at Microsoft’s Professional Developers’ Conference in October 2003, is set to make its appearance with a first Community Technology Preview planned for next month.
Indigo, expected in 2006 with a beta in the first half of 2005, was originally planned as part of the delayed Longhorn operating system, but it will now be available separately, for download, for use with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Indigo is designed to provide a unified programming model for the construction of secure, and reliable service oriented transactions, according to Microsoft.
As such, Indigo will provide built-in support for specifications such as WS-Federated Identity, along with other specifications tackling reliable messaging and security in the family of web services specifications jointly authored by Microsoft, IBM Corp and others.
The first half of this year will see workshops for WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Managment, WS-Device Profile and WS-Metadata Exchange. Microsoft will hold the workships with BEA Systems Inc, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, among others, in an attempt to ensure the interoperability of web services between products.
Eric Rudder, Microsoft senior vice president for server and tools, said Indigo’s core value proposition is interoperability. Speaking at the company’s annual VSLive conference in San Francisco, California, Rudder laid out Microsoft’s current vision and roadmap for Indigo.
The next version of Microsoft’s integration server, BizTalk Server 2006, will feature an adaptor that allows it to talk to Indigo, however the subsequent version of BizTalk Server will be able to talk natively to Indigo, according to Rudder. Ingdgo will become the native communications layer for BizTalk Server.
Microsoft’s popular database, SQL Sever, will also go Indigo. The services broker the software that enables two SQL Server databases to transfer date between each other provided in SQL Server 2005 will eventually communicate using Indigo. The delayed SQL Server 2005 is due later this year, with no date mentioned for its successor.
Microsoft’s goal for Indigo is consistent with its strategy around the .NET Framework. While the .NET Framework provides a single programming model across multiple Microsoft products and runtimes, so Indigo is being designed to provide a single communications layer also across products and runtimes.
Rudder stressed Microsoft would continue to support the classic protocols, like ASI and LDAP, but said: You will see the Microsoft Windows Server roadmap move to a consistent web services model, so you don’t have to use different APIs.
He noted: We will look at SharePoint [Microsoft’s collaboration server and portal] running on web services.
It is hoped Indigo will simplify the coding required for building web services, through the use of series of so-called attributes that help reduce need for programming with individual lines of code.
