Testing is a first-order constituent of SOA governance. Assuring that services and service infrastructure components meet functional and technical requirements across lifecycle stages and environments, including production, is an architectural precept in SOA. Gone are the days when testing was an isolated hop in the old disjointed SDLC.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Extensible Markup Language, more popularly known as XML, has found its uses in many areas of software products. Though XML offers a lot of features and uses, it's hard to develop with and maintain without good tools. This review discusses such a tool that would help XML and Java developers use XML efficiently.

A new breed of web manager is emerging to link content management more closely to website visitor satisfaction. The new web manager may operate under several professional guises: 'customer advocate,' 'information guru,' or 'metator,' to name just a few. They need to employ a very different set of soft skills than traditional webmastering, and many enterprises are struggling with the personnel challenges of this transition.

Dynamic languages like Ruby and Python have been enjoying a burst of popularity in the Web development community and there are a plethora of frameworks for those platforms that allow them to solve a wide variety of problems. There's one company that's building its own dynamic language from the ground up with a single-minded approach to the problem of fast prototyping for Service Oriented Architectures.

Many enterprises are currently reorganizing their people, processes, and technology around services. A few are holistically revamping their enterprise architectures around SOA and embarking on roadmaps to achieve grandiose business goals.

BPEL or Business Process Execution Language is an XML and Web standards-based SOA (service-oriented architecture) standard that allows business people to combine services into automated processes. As described in this review, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL product family includes a visual designer that works by allowing non-programmers to assemble Web services into processes by dragging and dropping graphical representations of components (Web services) and 'wiring' them together in sequences and flowcharts.

The folks at Active Endpoints carefully thought through how to support users in their move to WS-BPEL 2.0. This resulted in the ability of BPEL 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 processes to co-exist during design, test, and execution in both the designer and the engine. This lets users migrate their processes at their own pace. I've been burned in the past by products that required a big bang conversion so the ability to support 1.1 and 2.0 processes easily is a huge win.

SOA, EDA, BCM, ESB and BPEL...More than IT Catch Phrases? I recently had the chance to evaluate the next-generation Fiorano SOA Platform 2006 suite from Fiorano Software, Inc. As an architect and developer who's worked with previous versions of the kit over the last three years in addition to several competitor offerings, I looked forward to sitting down with Fiorano's latest release.

Few topics evoke more groans and eye rolling from software engineers and Web developers than the dreaded 'TESTING.' Testing falls into the same category as documentation, refactoring code, dusting, and visiting the dentist. Put it off until the last minute, do as little as possible, do it quickly, and move on to something else. I must confess that I have the same visceral reaction to the thought of 'testing' as others do. Consequently, I approached the prospect of reviewing a testing tool with the loathing of visiting the dentist. I was very relieved to discover that Parasoft's SOAtest 5.0 took a lot of the pain, frustration, and busy work out of the testing experience.

IAB Studio is a tightly integrated set of development and runtime tools you can use to easily create browser-based applications, reports, and workflows with rich user interface controls. It makes liberal use of client-side event processing and AJAX-based communication to a J2EE server to provide a more responsive user experience with lighter server loads.

Security is a major component of application development and must be tailored to the environment and audience of the system. In many respects, the more widely available an application is, the more important security becomes. Properly testing and securing Web Services applications is a challenging task. A tool that facilitates this process and provides visibility into application vulnerabilities is the AppScan product from Watchfire.

Services Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and business collaboration technologies and platforms, often enabled by Web Services and orchestration constructs like BPEL, can be a tremendous business benefit. SOAs can provide the fl exibility in enterprises to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions. Collaboration platforms enable tighter integration between trading partners both at a data and process level. When successfully implemented, these approaches and tools can garner significant improvements in efficiency, communication, service levels, and ultimately profits. However, quantifying the benefit can prove challenging.

By nature Web Services is a distributed technology. With distribution comes great flexibility for architectural topologies. Components can be strategically placed in different physical locations to optimize performance, maintenance and business processes. In large organizations one physical location may handle sales services, while another delivers contract management. As organizations build Service Oriented Architectures that stitch together these physically dispersed services, distributed development becomes an interesting challenge to overcome. Many collaborative technologies exist today to facilitate better communications and information sharing among workers, but it's rare to find a distributed development environment.

Business process execution Language support or BPEL is at the top of every enterprise SOA punch list. It's an XML-based language designed to support long-running complex business transactions in the form of orchestrated Web Service interactions. Like most XML formats, you wouldn't want to construct and debug a process of any complexity by hand and an 'engine' is required to recognize and execute BPEL.

Documentation is generally the final step in the software development cycle and while it is a very important component of the entire software package, last-minute changes in software can lead to major alterations in documentation. The inability to quickly incorporate such amendments in software into documentation has made it difficult for technical writers to author and produce quality deliverables applicable to all audiences without delaying the software production cycle. Additionally, ensuring consistency in documentation published across a wide range of media can lead to further delays. XMetaL Author 4.6 Service Pack 2 DITA Edition (XMetaL Author DITA) by Blast Radius does a successful job of alleviating this very problem.

Apache Software Foundation's Xindice is an open source native XML database. Apache provides great software to developers such as the Apache Web Server, Tomcat Application Server, Cocoon Web Development Framework, Struts Framework, Ant, and many more under an open source license. Apache Web Server is an industrial-strength product that is used by many high-traffic Web sites. Apache Tomcat is a servlet container that implements both Java Servlets and Java Server Pages. The fact that Xindice is a member of the Apache Software Foundation gives it substantial credibility, because Apache produces well-known, well-respected software. We will explore the Xindice native XML database beginning with its installation and advancing step by step. As the Xindice home page suggests, you are encouraged to pronounce it as 'zeen-dee-chay' with your best faux Italian accent. Xindice supports XPath query language, XML:DB, and XUpdate standards in Java, in addition to XML-RPC API for non-Java programmers.

The Zoho series of online software products from AdventNet has been growing quickly over the last year, and their Zoho Planner product has just been revamped. Designed specifically for the Web 2.0 era, Zoho Planner is an online service for managing task lists and appointments.

When I first looked over MagooClient from Magoo Software, it was difficult to categorize. I expected that it would be another composite application builder, but that's not what I found. Instead I found a tool that not only allows users to interact with business processes, but that also becomes part of the business process itself. MagooClient can not only reach out and perform Web service requests, but it is designed to also be inserted in the path of XML messages.

In a service-oriented architecture, the ultimate goal is to quickly and easily build new applications as composites of existing services. Building out the independent services in a manner that supports reuse is itself very challenging. However, several tools are beginning to appear to easily bring applications together once the critical mass of applications is achieved. One such tool is the FusionWare Integration Server.

A number of solutions exist for creating Java-based Web services from a variety of different providers. Options range from individual processing engines that plug into existing application servers to large enterprise-class platforms in which Web services is one of many components. Each option provides its own set of challenges and benefits while addressing different types of requirements.

In the past, business process management has not been a significant area of concern for many corporations. However, with increased regulatory scrutiny facing companies today, the need for formalized definitions, checks and balances, and management oversight is a reality.

Building truly collaborative systems relationships between organizations is a daunting challenge in today's business environment. While technologies such as Web services have risen to assist, true collaboration requires a far greater set of functionality.

There was a time when the term 'spreadsheet' simply meant columns of data that were summed up. Although this is all the functionality some people require, Excel has evolved into a much more powerful tool. Users now have the ability to create complex formulas with built-in functions such as MAX, SIN, and SUMIF. They can link workbooks together and not only import data directly from a database, but mirror many database capabilities using VLOOKUP and Pivot Tables. Business administrators can use Excel to automate many of their daily tasks, where they used to require the IT department to develop a database and application. With this additional power, concepts such as primary and foreign keys are no longer foreign to the common worker.

XML development is a term that can mean many things to many different people. For some, it is the modeling and creation of XML Schemas and instance documents used to exchange data. Others see it as a part of the larger effort of developing Web services. Still others view it as a means to transform and integrate systems whose data structures and definitions are proprietary.

The moniker 'Shared Data Services' has a sexy ring to it, and in a market where service-oriented architecture is the topic du jour, you may be tempted to roll your eyes... but don't. Pantero targets an important segment where business spends $80 billion annually on integration and another $19 billion on manual reconciliation.

As departments and organizations in the enterprise adopt Web services, the importance of managing and securing, and in some cases, extending these services to partners, grows. Using a centralized platform to do it reduces the effort and cost involved, while upping security. Web Services Manager from Oracle is designed to meet the challenge of stitching together services in large enterprises into a single management system.

Organizations large and small routinely face challenges in managing business processes. From an administrative standpoint, policies and procedures are put in place to ensure compliance. However, no matter how strictly they are enforced, there are always those who work outside their boundaries.

Much has been written recently about the business-to-business aspects of Web services, but what about the region between the Web service and the desktop? Above All Software lays claim to this 'last mile' by providing a platform for delivering composite applications.

sforce.com surfaces the services used by the saleforce.com CRM solution to provide an exhaustive development platform used to integrate new functionality and develop applications. While the services provided using industry-standard Web services protocols (XML and WSDL) represent one of the most complete Web service framework implementations to date...

Security is important. Anyone in the business of designing, developing, hosting, or managing business applications understands this fundamental statement. Web services present unique challenges such that the integrity and security of the content of the exchanged documents is just as important as the integrity of the communications link between the trading partners.

The DreamFactory suite is a mature development and execution platform for crafting rich, event-driven interfaces. DreamFactory picks up the UI development 'gauntlet' with a thoroughly thought out metaphor, framework, and tools whose sophistication matches, and usually exceeds, that of the other application components while remaining straightforward to develop in.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), while its underpinnings have been around for years, has recently become one of the most talked about topics in the IT industry. The interest in SOAs is largely due to the emergence of Web services and their ability to expose business applications through well-defined interfaces in a platform-independent manner. While an SOA need not be built using Web services, it certainly presents an attractive option for a variety of environments.

No matter how advanced enterprise systems become, the sophistication of the tools available to build them, or the advances of architectural approaches and best practices from which to start, the life blood of any system is the raw data. Without the data, what's the point? Whether the system is simply collecting information from a set of HTML forms, or is one participant in a highly complex, distributed environment consisting of several integration touch points, there will always be the challenge of getting data into and out of the system.

SOAPtest is a comprehensive testing tool geared to testing Web services. It provides unit, system, and load testing features and support for WSDL, WS-Security, and JMS, including asynchronous messaging. It also supports attachments, access to performance monitors, comparative reporting, and more.

There's a phenomenon I've witnessed again and again in my years building systems. I call it 'Guerilla IT.' Listen to my description and see if you've witnessed it inside your organization.

As Web services become more prevalent in the application tier and Web application sophistication increases, alternative approaches to the traditional Web tier are being developed. The Workstation Server product suite by General Interface provides a refreshing standards-based alternative for creating rich browser-based, event-driven interfaces to Web services (in IE 5.5+ and similar browsers).

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 historical data, and a differencing engine, among others. Overall, this is an excellent update; what follows are some of its highlights.

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 provide developers with the ability to '...incrementally measure, debug and fine-tune the performance and functionality of their Web services...'

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 programming language, any runtime platform, and any network transport.