CXWS CIM Technology

A large part of my work at AppIQ has been the development of our CIM technology, called CXWS, for which I'm the architect and principal implementor. CIM, the Common Information Model, is the modeling standard published by the Distributed Management Task Force. (I also chair the Architecture Working Group for the DMTF.)

The etymology of the name CXWS amounts to an historical accident, combined with the need to call it something so that work could proceed. It was intended to contrast specifically with the open source "Java WBEM Services" implementation, or JWS. We used JWS for a couple of years: We always found it to be buggy and senselessly space-intensive, while requiring a lot of unnecessary work implementing nearly-identical entry points for providers.

I gave this presentation on CXWS at the 2004 "Enterprise Management World" conference. CXWS features a radically simplified provider interface (making the development of providers much more tractable) and a careful, space- and time-efficient implementation of common operations. It also supports our AppIQ-specific extension of "partial failure", allowing the streamed transmission of both partial result data and indications of failure (typically remote systems that are temporarily unavailable).

In August, 2005, IANA officially registered port 4673 (TCP and UDP) for "CXWS Operations", meaning it's the standard port used by the CXWS binary streaming protocol.