WebServices dot org

"

Moskun: SOA cannot scale without effective collaboration. We’ve watched SOA bubble up from Web services projects, and we’re finding that technologies to connect disparate applications are getting pretty well refined. But what people are struggling with now is getting disparate groups to talk, to collaborate, even though they are using different platforms, different languages, and different internal cultures. Those are significant impediments to progress.

"

"

Grossman: Once you start getting these more loosely coupled groups, you start to cross boundaries, both logistical and political within companies. It’s hard enough to get groups building in Java to start communicating in a more formal way. I was talking to a woman at an insurance company who told me: ‘I’m a COBOL programmer on a mainframe who’s been doing this for a long time. But when I go talk to the .NET people building another piece of the system, we just can’t communicate. They look at me strangely.’

"

"

Grossman: People whose jobs are in governance, testing, diagnostic, and support need to communicate in some way. They need to be able to ask, ‘here’s a scenario that I’m working on, and can you look at it as well?’ You need to be able to look at the same scenario. Responses such as ‘hey, I’m in .NET, here’s my .NET log of a problem,’ or, ‘I called you, and your service failed, so it’s your problem’ really tug at the flexibility that people are investing in. If you can’t solve those types of problems through communications, then that flexibility investment disappears quickly.

"

"

Moskun: When Frank and I got started here, we had a vision for a collaborative diagnostic system. We released SOAPscope three years ago as a seed product, to build awareness in the market. We quickly learned that the hype around SOA was way higher than reality. But we had a lot of confidence that the market would develop. We continue to evolve around SOAPScope and model collaborative features and other features as we learned from the market, which has led up to Coral.

"

"

Grossman: SOAPscope was designed for the individual user, as a way to make WSDL and SOAP messages readable, and allow visibility into what the XML is, bringing it into more of a data view. We thought initially our users would be primarily programmers. Then, testers quickly found it as a really useful way for testing Web services. When we put in our analysis features, that brought in architects, support and business analysts as well.

"

"

Grossman: What surprised us that when we added our ‘Invoke’ feature in SOAPscope, a lot of companies turned it into a full testing solution.

"

"

Moskun: There are other tools that allow you to do other types of testing, such as data production and regression testing. Even though Invoke is a pretty simple feature, it worked on just about any WSDL of any service. As a result, we have several large companies using SOAPscope as their primary testing vehicle of Web services. Some are using it in a manual way, and some companies have added automation around it.

"

"

Moskun: With Coral, we watched how customers were using the testing feature, and have automated the next level up in the chain of regression testing.

"

"

Grossman: SOA and Web services governance comes down to making sure you comply with WS-I Basic Profile 1.0. SOAPscope has the WS-I test, so it’s easy to run at the push of a button. We also include our own version of the WS-I test, so instead of the flat HTML report you get from the WS-I test, it’s interactive. You can use it to solve problems, click on links and get help and figure out what is going on.

"

"

Moskun: When WS-I announced Basic Profile 1.0, they did a good job of educating people on the need to do interoperability testing, and that if your services weren’t interoperable; they weren’t nearly as valuable assets. We were out there before the WS-I tools, but when they came out, our analysis was much easier to use, particularly to pinpoint problems when there were issues that didn’t conform. We became a tool of choice for conformance testing.

"

"

Grossman: People used it quite extensively, and we worked with customers to get our best practices earlier in the development environment. A lot of our first customers would say, ‘they didn’t comply, but it was the end of the project, so they wouldn’t change it.’ Which didn’t help much, but people were learning a lot of lessons. Now, we have a lot of customers that are adopting Coral Server for compliance.

"

"

Moskun: Most of our customers in large IT organizations, and their processes are pretty well woven into the fabric of their organizations. With the waterfall method, there’s pretty good separation between roles and departments with a good amount of process. A lot of these customers are moving toward SOA incrementally, where large teams are being broken up into smaller teams, and smaller teams might be responsible for building and supporting a few services. So they’re changing the way they do things, but are resistant to change their process. In a lot of cases, they’re stuck in the middle. We’d expend a lot of energy trying to get people to change their process from more of a waterfall approach to more of a continuous development approach that a real SOA requires. We found is a lot of the process discussions are inflexible. The people don’t have a lot of flexibility to change things.

"

"

Moskun: To get over that wall, most companies are going to have to make changes in their processes. A large majority of our customers aren’t over that wall yet. The market really is relatively immature when you talk about SOA. Web services are getting well penetrated, and there are a lot of projects that use them, and a lot of people call what they’re doing SOA. But a lot of them are still largely point-to-point.

"

"

Grossman: For collaboration, we say there has to be a way to take a scenario and be able to have multiple people look at that scenario, and see it from the same point of view, to be able to reproduce it, and it has to be platform independent. However, our customers don’t say, ‘let’s collaborate today.’ They say, ‘look, we do our work everyday, but there’s certain tools we use everyday we would really like to be collaborative. Those are under governance, testing, diagnostic, and support – areas, that in a service oriented architecture, we need to share with other parts of the company.’

At the same time, nobody is saying, ‘hey, we’re switching our whole company to service oriented architecture tomorrow, and we need an infrastructure for it.’ Rather, they’re looking into a pragmatic way to grow into that. So Mindreef Coral Server, first and foremost, is a collaborative hub for doing governance testing, and diagnostic and support. If there’s a code in XML, or they intertwine, we provide collaborative methodology.

"