Since WSJ last looked at Mindreef's SOAPScope back in July '03 (Vol. 3, issue 7), much has been added in functionality and features to benefit the package. New items include integration with Visual Studio .NET, integration with the WS-I testing tools, a new Graph View for looking at hi...

Not surprisingly, Web services management tools are quickly appearing to assist developers and system administrators alike with the maintenance of service-based applications. One such product is AmberPoint Express, a free Web services management and monitoring tool whose mission is to ...

There are many compelling reasons to use Web services. It seems as if everyone is at least playing with Web services. Almost every software vendor is building support for Web services into its platforms, languages, and tools. Web services enable any-to-any integration, supporting any p...

Altova recently released the 2004 version of XMLSPY and introduced a new product, MapForce 2004. This new version includes several updates and features that will assist with Web services development while also providing a graphical XML mapping tool for data transformation.

If you're looking to deploy a UDDI registry that provides strong standards support, a capable API, and security and management capabilities, look no further than Systinet's WASP UDDI version 4.6. WASP UDDI is a UDDI server that supports UDDI specification versions 1 and 2 as well as th...

As a senior architect I always have a weather eye on evolving technologies in order to answer questions on how decisions made today will affect applications three to five years into the future.

We've all heard the terms: portals, gadgets, portlets, dashboarding. But what does it all mean? And what role do Web services play in this exciting new world of componentized content?

Web services have staked their claim as a key technology in building and integrating large, distributed enterprise systems. More often than not, however, Web services may be just one piece of a myriad of interfaces.

(October 27, 2003) - Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2003 started off with six preconference educational sessions. Most notable among these were Jeff Richter's (of Wintellect fame) session on CLR internals, Chris Sells and Rocky Lhotka's session on smart clients, and Tim...

What do you do after you've cofounded a company that developed award-winning products for distributed computing, won a Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, and finished a book on Web services? If you're Graham Glass you start another company and continue pushing the envelope of distri...

With Web services becoming more prevalent in organizations, keeping tabs on performance, analyzing problems, and managing overall quality of service is as important as ever.

In today's business universe, the boardroom mantra ringing out across the globe is 'control costs at all cost.' Executives that have survived in a difficult business environment know that if you want to compete successfully, you must have increasing transparency into the costs of d...

Smarter client technology is bringing a new class of Web service-powered applications to the desktop. Case in point: PhotoWorks Inc. is leveraging a common Web services infrastructure to power multiple sales channels.

In my spare time I participate in a nonprofit entity along with a number of other busy colleagues. Most of the hard work is done in our spare time and we occasionally meet to polish the work.

GLUE, by The Mind Electric, is a framework for developing and publishing Web services. It is simple, easy, and fast to create Web services. GLUE supports SOAP1.2, WSDL1.1, and UDDI v2. It comes in two editions: GLUE standard is free, and GLUE Professional has more advanced features.

When we think of all of the various complexities that can surface when implementing Web services at the enterprise level, we often think of integration issues, transactional integrity, security, and so on. We wouldn't necessarily rank file transfers as one of the more difficult technol...

While carefully sorting out junk mail in my inbox late one evening, I came across something that caught my attention. First of all, as product review editor, it is my duty and responsibility to give the subject line of any e-mail a quick once-over for Web service buzz words before I gi...

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA exten...

As Web services proliferate and more and more applications expose their business logic in this manner, the need for effective user interfaces to consume these services grows. WebFace and WebFace Studio, from Vultus, provide a means of creating rich, Windows-like user interfaces distrib...

One of the least appreciated standards in the Web services world is Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration - UDDI. The concepts of the UDDI standard are fairly simple - link Web service consumers to providers. If you are a provider, you want to advertise who you are, the nat...

Integration efforts within an enterprise have been aided by the adoption of service-oriented architectures and common integration infrastructure. While the service-oriented architecture needs to be driven from within the organizations, a common infrastructure can come from outside. Gra...

They carefully planned for days for the worst possible attack. Once their presence was detected, the enemy's agents, who were stealthy and highly intelligent, would surely be drawn to their defensive walls. It would only be a matter of time before the ongoing and relentless probing wou...

A favorite dot-com-era TV commercial of mine depicts several young entrepreneurs eagerly watching a ticker for their first e-commerce transaction. Their initial cheers and high-fives quickly faded into dead silence as the transactions started mounting into the millions. How could they ...

Web services tool vendors frequently compete on how quickly their users can 'generate a Web service from scratch' or 'expose a Java/COM+/CORBA class as a Web service.' While speed of development is important, the broader business needs of an enterprise must be the main driver of new te...

The RPC mechanism enables a remote procedure call from a client to be communicated to a remote server. SOAP RPC supports three types of parameter modes - IN, OUT, and INOUT - for remote method invocation. In this article I'll explain how JAX-RPC supports SOAP RPC parameter modes and h...

PowerBuilder, a 4GL RAD tool, has extended its productivity to Web services components and application development. With this RAD environment, developers may not only make use of Web services, creating new Web services components and applications, but also easily migrate existing compo...

The next time a CEO or CIO comes to you looking for an innovative solution to an intractable business problem, you might want to remember the example set by the Medusa jellyfish and the snail.

Web services have now officially outlived the initial wave of hype, and many corporate developers are in some phase of designing, building, testing, or deploying their first mission-critical services. While Web services offer a new way to expose your application functionality to progra...

The Web services phenomenon has finally arrived. All of the developer conferences and symposiums are talking about how Web services will revolutionize the world. Well, it takes action to start a riot, and this article should set your wheels in motion. In this article, you'll learn how ...

Kazoo's CEO, Joseph Cardoza, was asked by Colliers' CIO, Jon Green, to propose a solution for a problem that had been haunting the Colliers IT department for a while.

To most people, the term 'Web service' implies a remote server offering some functionality that can be invoked over an HTTP connection, through SOAP-based messages.

The Web service-based functionality provided in Sun Microsystems J2EE 1.4 is a culmination of the Java APIs and utilities that were previously part of the Java Web Services Developer Pack (WSDP) and have been repackaged for the most part into J2EE 1.4. For the sake of this review, I wi...

XMLSPY Enterprise Edition version 5 provides a powerful set of XML tools and utilities to develop and test XML-based applications and Web services. Several new features that expand on its XML tool base are available in this new version, including a WSDL editor, XSL stylesheet debugger,...

Information technology sometimes reminds me of the magic industry. The first time a new and exciting act is performed, it creates a level of stir in the industry, leading to the eagerness of other magicians to perform it in their acts.

The Sun ONE architecture is Sun's software vision, architecture, platform, and expertise for solving many of today's enterprise integration, interoperability, and development issues.

Web services fits into the operational model that The Open Group calls Boundaryless Information Flow - the secure, reliable, and timely flow of information throughout and between enterprises. At our recent conference, chief officers from enterprises that use Web services in their busin...

Web services will revolutionize CRM (customer relationship management). This revolution will affect not only how sales, marketing, and service professionals interact with customers, but also how IT departments implement and support the technology. CRM is, in fact, suffering from pre...

During the past few years we've seen an exponential rise in Web-based applications, and we're currently beginning a transition to a service-oriented Web. Web services technology enables several functional elements (services) to communicate with each other.

Altio, Inc., is about to announce the preview edition of AltioLive 3.0, a presentation server platform for 'rich client' Web applications. In addition to its current architecture, this release provides a Web service adapter capable of providing real-time synchronization, as well as...

I must admit that the subtitle I used here sounds a bit like an overused marketing cliché broadcast from a late-night commercial on television. Anyone seriously involved in enabling enterprise resources as SOAP-based services on the Web knows that the 'today' part is quite a stretch.