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 TEST CENTER Web services wizardry By James R. Borck December 21, 2001 THE ULTIMATE ACCEPTANCE of next-generation Web services technologies in the enterprise hinges on their ease of adoption and solid performance. Moreover, developers will require timesaving tools that can speed the development of Web services interfaces for applications and hook efficiently into Web services middleware processes.
Workbench is loaded with wizard-driven development tools and resources that will ease the requirements for migrating existing Java applications to Web services, and that will also create interfaces for new applications based on developing Web services standards. Workbench smooths the development process with the inclusion of the XML-based Ant utility from the Jakarta Project for compiling, building projects, and generating and validating archive files. Silverstream has taken hits from some early adopters of its application server because they found ROI elusive due to the solution's highly proprietary nature and limited feature set. The latest iteration has made vast improvements from previous iterations, boasting many enhanced enterprise features. It also supports deployment to other J2EE-compliant application servers, such as BEA WebLogic, Oracle9i, IBM WebSphere, and Jakarta Tomcat, to increase your options. Workbench lacks some of the editing and debugging sophistication found in competing products such as Borland's JBuilder and Delphi. We also would have preferred to see some additional tools for easing XML manipulation efforts. Nevertheless, Silverstream eXtend Workbench offers a good, extensible environment for minimizing the intricacies of Web services integration that will bolster productivity in Web services development and J2EE application deployment. Extended family Installing Workbench and its requisite environment was a snap. The IDE (integrated development environment) is bundled with jBroker Web, Silverstream's compiler, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) run-time engine for processing and invoking XML-based remote procedure calls. It was all up and running with minimal effort. Workbench meets compatibility requirements to operate with Web services standards, including SOAP, XML, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and it delivers a battery of time-saving tools, editors, and wizards that we found greatly simplified the development process. Wizards facilitated the creation and editing of WSDL files, a UDDI manager offered easy registry querying and publishing, and the Web services wizard enabled us to easily create Web services-ready applications from Java classes, EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans), and WSDL files. We were immediately comfortable in the structured, J2EE archive environment available to manage projects. Here too, wizards offered timesaving capabilities, speeding many tasks of J2EE development from archive creation to generating deployment descriptors. Workbench can create and package entity and session beans, produce servlet skeletons, JSP (Java Server Pages) code, and create new Java classes, and in our tests, it delivered fast deployment capabilities equally well to both our Silverstream application server and BEA WebLogic. Further, jBroker Web performed particularly well, processing SOAP requests with a remarkable speed that was noticeably faster than in comparable tests using the Apache SOAP server for parsing. Although Silverstream has remedied a number of the minor bugs found in Version 1.0, several negligible wrinkles remain to be ironed out, particularly with regard to file and archive manipulation in the make and build process. But in all, Workbench showed impressive capabilities. Building a framework Although Workbench's low cost is attractive -- $300, and available for download free for a limited time from Silverstream's Web site -- most real-time enterprise integration of Web services will require additional support features which, not coincidentally, can be found in compatible products in the Silverstream eXtend line. These products include eXtend Director, for device presentation flexibility, and eXtend Composer, for stronger XML integration. Many early users of the Silverstream Application Server have endured limitations in the environment, but they shouldn't give up just yet if they've held out this long. The latest version of the application server has matured, and it includes fail-over improvements, clustering capabilities, and remote administration, all of which help bring it up to snuff for enterprise consideration in Web services deployment. Jumping headfirst into the wake of Web services, Silverstream also has just announced additional supports and advances, including a free Developer Edition Beta of the eXtend JEDDI (Java Enterprise Discovery, Description, and Integration) registry; a Java UDDI implementation that supports a number of databases including IBM DB2, Oracle 8i, and Microsoft SQL server; and a new jBroker middleware offering that sports enterprise provisions for CORBA support and Java messaging services, which can greatly enhance application server capabilities for database and legacy system integration. Silverstream eXtend Workbench 1.1 offers a good, unified environment for Java development teams looking to build Web services hooks into Java applications. And with a history of development experience behind it, Silverstream seems well-poised for the long haul toward Web services fruition. Test Center Managing Analyst James R. Borck (james_borck@infoworld.com) covers e-business solutions for enterprise computing.
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