Two emerging companies are working to make Web services more
reliable by releasing products that enhance simple object access
protocol (SOAP) functionality.
Chutney Technologies yesterday (29 April) released Apptimizer for
SOAP while Parasoft has unveiled SOAPtest.
Chutney's software, compatible with both J2EE and .net, is designed
to eliminate bottlenecks resulting from Web services.
The Chutney product line consists of a SOAP Library and Chutney
storage engine.
The two work together to eliminate Web services bottlenecks by
essentially tapping into an existing SOAP library to identify where
the software can reuse data, according to Greg Govatos,
vice-president of marketing at Chutney, based in Atlanta,
USA.
When a SOAP call is made the SOAP call checks with the Chutney
cache, Govatos said. "We mitigate the steps that applications need
to perform that function."
Govatos pointed, as an example, to a company that delivers stock
quotes across the Internet via the Web services model. Instead of
making the system search for stock quotes upon every request,
Chutney enables the customer to cache popular results then, in
turn, deliver those more quickly.
Bottlenecks occur in pretty much anything that requires a call to
databases, mainframes, or other data sources, Govatos said.
Chutney plans to formally announce Apptimizer for SOAP at the
upcoming N+I tradeshow next week in Las Vegas. The software will be
generally available on 1 June.
Meanwhile on the Web services testing front, Parasoft's SOAPtest
tool enables functionality, load and regression testing to find
errors in Web services that use the SOAP protocol.
Parasoft is positioning SOAPtest as software to use early in the
Web services development lifecycle to ensure that Web services
function properly.
SOAPtest can emulate clients and servers to verify that Web
services and related components are operating as intended and that
they are scaling when need be. According to the California-based
company, SOAPtest can pinpoint sources of error.
The software also can be used to validate, query and transform XML
as well as to create rules to prevent XML errors from
multiplying.
Web services are still young enough that not many customers are
experiencing bottlenecks or scalability issues but that is likely
to change as more companies deploy Web services, according to
Michael Hoch, a senior analyst with consultancy Aberdeen
Group.
"Right now there aren't a lot of bottlenecks and problem areas in
Web services. But if companies don't take these potential problems
into account during the design phase, they'll be shut down pretty
quickly when they go live with Web services," Hoch said.