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 TEST CENTER Plugging in Web apps By James R. Borck May 11, 2001 WebCollage Syndicator enhances business partnerships by bolstering service integration
Once you implement Syndicator, your business partners can choose to seamlessly incorporate your available services on their own Web sites. In turn, you're spared the usual expenses in application-specific, back-end integration. Syndicator set up easily on our Windows 2000 platform with the only prerequisites being Sun's Java Development Kit 1.2.2 and Unify's Internet Server API plug-in Java Server Pages engine to enable JSPs and servlets. We began working with Syndicator by familiarizing ourselves with WSML (Web Services Markup Language). This proprietary tagging mechanism from WebCollage defines and describes services on a Web page. Once the service description page is defined, WebCollage packages it and adds it to the Syndicator repository. Your partners can query your repository, select a service, and retrieve the tag to invoke the service from their Web pages. The tag is a single line of code, which makes remote installation of applications extremely easy. Improvements in this version of Syndicator include Solaris support, provisions for multiple domains and content providers, and enhanced control for partners to change the look and feel of the services to match their own site's design. The toolkit lacks the requisite registration and lookup capabilities for true Web-service compliance, although WebCollage has announced support for at least UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) in the next release. Moreover, unlike products such as iChannel from iMediation, Syndicator has limited tracking and reporting capabilities for accurately gauging usage and quality-of-service issues. Clustering is supported for load balancing, which is essential under this bottleneck-prone architecture, although Linux support would be a welcomed addition to lower the cost of OS licensing when beefing up server farms. All told, WebCollage Syndicator is a worthy ally in lowering partnership integration costs and opening new revenue channels through express application availability.  Test Center Managing Analyst James R. Borck (james_borck@infoworld.com) covers e-business solutions for InfoWorld.
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