(March 18, 2002) - One of the best ways to drive adoption of emerging technologies, such as Web services, is to provide the developers with something to tinker with. IBM's alphaWorks and developerWorks portals do just that. In 2001, there were 85,000+ downloads of Web services technologies from alphaWorks, IBM's resource of emerging technologies. In addition, site traffic to the developerWorks "Web Services Zone" shot up 450% to more than two million page views. Developers are hungry for Web services-related information, and IBM is feeding it to them.

A recent Summit Strategies report notes that IBM has made "great progress in courting developers" and that alphaWorks and developerWorks have "evolved into one of the best developer sites on the Web. It is also one of the best online resources of any type for Web services information and assistance." Summit also stated that developerWorks edged out MSDN as the site offering the best resources for developers in 4Q01.

IBM's alphaWorks provides developers with previews of new technologies and concepts and also releases beta code of products and tools. Web Services Toolkit 3.0, one of the most popular downloads, gets the latest Web services technology into the hands of developers as quickly as possible. It provides developers with a runtime environment, examples to design and execute Web services, and introductory material to get started with Web services development. The WSTK 3.0 consolidates Web services-related technologies from various IBM development and research labs. The functions of the WSTK are based on specifications such as SOAP, WSDL, WS-Inspection, and UDDI, and run on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

The Web Services Gateway is a new technology that provides a more secure environment for Web services across firewalls. It acts as a bridge between service providers and service requestors and is a single point of control and access for a set of Web services. The Web Services Gateway also allows the interception of service invocations between Internet and Intranet environments, enabling developers to create intermediaries which act on the message abstraction rather than requiring the creation of new interceptors for each access channel.

IBM's Web Services Hosting Technology is a set of management tools that support revenue generating Web services. Web Services Hosting Technology is designed specifically for software developers and service providers, empowering them to bring Web services to a hosted environment regardless of the actual Web services implementation. It also supports the provisioning and metering of Web services without requiring code changes, decreasing time to market and development expenses for an ISV or service provider. In addition, Web Services Hosting Technology allows service providers to develop an integrated billing model to help them more easily track usage and collect revenue for the services.

"Web Services Hosting Technology is the first IBM alphaWorks release demonstrating an end-to-end Web services hosting scenario," said Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy, IBM. "It provides increased opportunity for developers and service providers to provision and meter Web services without changing code or the actual service implementation. Web Services Hosting Technology is key to help introduce the concept of hosted Web services to the development community." developerWorks , at www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/ , provides a wealth of information on anything from tools to FAQs to white papers and even downloadable code.

The Web Services Hosting Technology, the Web Services Gateway, and the Web Services Toolkit (WSTK) 3.0 are available for free, trial download on alphaWorks,, www.alphaWorks.ibm.com.