What is Whois-WS?

Whois-WS aims to provide a WebService interface for requesting WHOIS information about domains.

The future might have this direction, but the project will probably just die, because it's a playfield:

• Provide aggregation service for whois data from multiple registrars
• Cache whois data to prevent massive requets to remote whois servers
• Intelligent parsing of non-standardized whois information
• Transform non-standardized and standardized whois information into one common structure , the Whois-WS Common Schema (common.xsd)
• Provide additional information , such as nameserver zone information, SPF Information, historical information about domain
• With the help of thirdparty databases, even domain usage, uptime and more advanced information such as social integration of domain or content type could be provided
• If you have read until here, you seem to be interestd in such information. Give me a call if you would like to help on this project.

What is Whois? Each organization which manages one or more top-level domains (TLD), such as com/net/org, also provides a whois server. This whois server can be asked for information about domains in that TLD. At least, you get the information if that domain has been registered and whether it is connected or not. Most of the servers provide information about the current owner of the domain, and about technical contacts for the domain. Some even provide billing contacts or abuse contacts and the state of domain in regard whether it can be transferred to another registrar. Sadly, all this information is printed out in raw ASCII data. There are some efforts to bring this information in a standardized form, but afaik there is no public available client managing all the whois services under one point of interest. This is where Whois-WS comes into play. Whois-WS tries to aggregate all whois services into one single point, and to provide all this different information in the same way for all top level domains.

What is Smartwerkz Whois-WS? It is a private project for playing with Spring-WS , Apache Maven 2 , WSDL and other WebService-related technology. It is a Java project, managed by Maven build, developed with Eclipse Ganymede on Ubuntu 7.1 on a AMD64 machine. It uses Spring, Spring-WS, JAXB, Spring-WS-Security and JUnit 4 . As a local testing environment, it uses Jetty to quickly deploy the WebService locally. For manual testing, the tool soapui is used. The project is version controlled in a private Subversion repository, running on a Gentoo server.