WebServices dot org

Mindreef Inc. announced its next-generation flagship product, a collaborative environment that supports governance, as well as enhanced communication between teams of professionals involved in various stages of the lifecycles of Web services and SOA projects. Mindreef Coral's tools are available to various roles including architects, managers, business analysts, developers, testers and support staff and enable roles that do not have deep XML or programming skills to perform tasks that previously required more technical skills.

The new platform, called Mindreef Coral, enables architects, service teams, and business end users to collaborate and share information, regardless of role, skill set, or development environment. This offering builds on the capabilities offered in the vendor's SOAPscope product, which combined diagnostic tools for developers, testers, and support and operations staff. “As customers move beyond single Web service deployments into meaningful SOAs, one of their primary challenges is to break down organizational silos and communicate effectively across disparate teams,” said Frank Grossman, president and founder of Mindreef. “XML is a good language for developing services, but not for communicating with people.”

Each Mindreef Coral server extends the functionality of SOAPscope, acting as a collaborative hub that supports governance, testing, diagnostics, and support. The Coral environment includes a repository for collaborative data on Web services or SOA projects called the Mindreef Shared Workspace (MSW). MSW enables users encapsulate and share Web service data. Besides Web services artifacts such as WSDL files and SOAP messages, an MSW can contain a playable script, simulation data and descriptive notes. MSWs can be shared across teams, or externally with partners using Mindreef Coral's community portal. "If you are working on a scenario, and for some reason that services is not available, then you can continue working by simulating that service," Grossman said.

Another key feature in Coral is an extensible design-time governance environment based on the WS-I Basic Profile. "We designed Mindreef Coral to help everyone in the service oriented lifecycle communicate effectively, share important information, and contribute to the Web services development experience, while growing their SOAs efficiently and pragmatically," said Grossman. "We have customers with 150-page documents that describes all their rules. Nobody can memorize that, or understand all the XML. We give a very easy way to encode a rule through a combination of XPath and JavaScript. Plus, we'll provide 80 or 90 percent of the rules that companies need."

The key functions included in Mindreef Coral include the following XML toolsets:

• Foundational governance enables all team members to participate in the governance process. Multi-role tool support allows corporate architects to codify organizational policy and author custom rules. Project architects, developers and testers can check for compliance as services are built and tested. Support and operations staff can check for compliance causes when problems arise.

• Multi-role testing enables all team members to perform tests that are most meaningful to their roles. This includes functional and regression testing, as well as quality, interoperability and conformance to organizational and industry standards.

• Collaborative diagnostics enables service team and community users to collect and share all the elements of a Web service for problem analysis. Coral includes a first-to-market Web services simulation tool for prototyping Web services; prototypes can be run stand-alone or before the Web service is built.

• Lifecycle support is enabled by exposing service contracts in a form that can be understood and investigated. When problems are reported, Mindreef Coral enables assemble and communicate a complete and platform-independent, reproducible scenario that includes all relevant XML artifacts, a script and simulation data if necessary.

The Mindreef Coral server is currently shipping, priced at a subscription basis for $499 a year, or $1,500 for a perpetual license.

Webservices.Org recently spoke with Mindreef's founders, Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun, about the new Coral product and issues shaping the SOA market. For the in-depth Q&A, click here .

For more details about Coral, visit www.Mindreef.com .