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eXtend Workbench's Web services wizardry

SilverStream eXtend Workbench lacks some tools, but eases the way to Web services for Java application developers

By James R. Borck, InfoWorld, 02/01/02

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.

SilverStream builds upon developers' application server development experience and attempts to meet their needs with the release of its eXtend Web services platform. The integrated development environment, eXtend Workbench 1.1, supplies a graphical, Windows-based interface for developing and deploying J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and Web services applications.

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 smoothes 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 (return on investment) 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.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

 

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