As I mentioned earlier a bunch of us are pulling together some *wicked* demos (that's Canadian for *awesome*) for first ever Web Services Interoperability Education Day.

We crafted a plan for the tiered demonstration in late February and everyone broke off into their respective coding frenzy. Benjamin Mitchell took on extending .NET WSE 2.0 to create a SAML token issuer. Heinrich Gantenbein is extending the existing interop example he already created between .NET WSE and BEA Workshop 8.1/WebLogic Server. And Chris Haddad stepped up big time to build us an Apache Axis/Source ID Web service to receive SAML token signed messages and verify with the token issuer. (We switched to open source since we discovered it was VERY difficult to get our hands on a trial version of Tivoli to support our IBM WebSphere example...and the clock was ticking...).

Throughout all of this, John Bristowe and myself have been waving pom poms (John's term) and supporting the group either by testing code, discussing issues, and general coordination. In addition, Anant Kadiyala (run's the local BEA user group in San Diego, and teaches Web Services at UCSD Extension with me) stepped up to support the open source side, working with me configuring machines for the demos, and we'll be trouble-shooting the entire system here in San Diego before our esteemed speakers arrive.

Now, I have to admit that it was really very difficult for me NOT to *own* a specific part of the code for this event...given that I work with WSE 2.0, have a past with Axis and also know enough BEA to be dangerous :)... and I'm sure John and Anant may have similar feelings despite bandwidth issues we all have...however, this couldn't be a better display of teamwork in action. As issues come up, there is a support team to research issues, test code and find solutions...fast. We're running into x.509 certificate serialization issues, Web service specification implementation issues, and other configuration bottlenecks. Not to mention that coordinating all of this with the actual presentation is just a ton of work since we will be networked through a NAT router and hitting each others machines...good things...so, in short, this is a really great experience.

It is a honor to work with all of these guys...really.