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Jump-start developers

By James R. Borck
May 11, 2001

IBM alphaWorks gives developers a free chance to lay the groundwork for good Web services

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DEVELOPERS LOOKING to get their feet wet in Web services will be hard-pressed to find an off-the-shelf toolkit to support their efforts. But an impressive collection of tools is coming together on IBM alphaWorks.

The Web Services Toolkit (WSTK) 2.2 is not currently intended to be a cohesive application, but it does a good job bundling a run-time environment and tools for designing and running Web services applications.

Particularly well-suited to Java developers, WSTK allows developers to create Web services wrappers for Java classes, servlets, and Enterprise JavaBeans, and it automates creation of WSDL (Web Service Description Language) files. Moreover, the collection includes a local UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry and provides numerous demos and tutorials on how to properly publish, integrate, and message Web services.

Despite a number of minor buggy interface interactions and piecemeal capabilities, WSTK arms developers with useful tools to jump-start their exploration of Web services.

We used both the command-line interface and GUI-based wizardry of WSTK to easily develop wrappers for Java-based applications; however, we found that the graphical approach provided better control and access to parameters.

The Service Creation tool examined our applications and generated WSDL files. From them, WSTK culled service specifications to produce Java client proxies and server skeleton code for implementation. Version 2.2 gave us better control in selecting a specific public method with which to work.

The toolkit can be configured to run on Apache Tomcat, IBM's WebSphere Application Server 3.5, or the pared-down Embedded WebSphere included with the toolkit for testing and development.

Most of the modifications to this update relate to UDDI, and the kit now includes a client browser tool to publish and explore WSDL service registry descriptions.

Although WSTK relies on IBM's superceding specifications, such as Apache-SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI4J (UDDI for Java), the open-source code underlying these technologies is readily available.

WSTK offers additional technology previews, including Pluggable Provider for translating SOAP services to Window's COM (Component Object Model) objects and an interesting demonstration of SOAP digital signatures.

Reach InfoWorld Test Center Managing Analyst James R. Borck at james_borck@infoworld.com.

BOTTOM LINE
	Web Services Toolkit 2.2 BUSINESS CASE Encourage your developers to begin exploring Web services using the alphaWorks toolkit. Freely available, the basics for this essential, albeit nascent, technology can begin today. TECHNOLOGY CASE This toolkit is geared toward Java developers and standardizes on IBM-specific versions of emerging standards. Minimize the impact of change by delaying live deployment either until standards solidify or applications use only the most basic set standards.
	PROS + Simple configuration + Strong development environment + Improved UDDI references CONS - Incomplete application - Minor buggy interactions COST Free PLATFORMS Windows 2000/NT 4 SP 5; Linux Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.2.2 and higher COMPANY IBM Corp.; www.alphaworks.ibm.com

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