Service-Oriented Management Technology Landscape

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

Testing Web services: Even more complex

”There’s a lot of stuff missing from Web services testing,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, a consultancy in Waltham, Mass. ”It’s not on any company’s radar” quite yet.
”It’s still not clear how to test orchestrated sites, especially if there’s more than one company involved,” Bloomberg said.

He sees agile development as ”the only approach to testing Web services in corporate environments,” because the test is developed, the component passes and then a fully tested, scaled application grows gradually. ”Everything you produce is fully tested; it passes every day,” he explained.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

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Testing Web Services

Web Services today are often little more than software components wrapped in SOAP interfaces, and as such, today’s software testing tool vendors need only add simple XML support to their product lines to offer Web Services testing capabilities to their customers. However, over the next five years or so, Web Services herald a shift in distributed computing toward loosely coupled, standards-based, Service-oriented architectures. Testing these architectures and the Web Services that constitute them is another matter entirely. Only a few testing tool vendors have any expressed strategy for offering testing tools that work in a Service-oriented environment, and no vendors have a clear product roadmap that addresses all the Web Services testing needs that enterprises will face between now and 2006. Zapthink recommends that testing vendors evaluate their Web Services testing capabilities based not on current requirements, but upon emerging requirements for Web Services testing.

SOA Tools & Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

Testing Web Services

Web Services today are often little more than software components wrapped in SOAP interfaces, and as such, today’s software testing tool vendors need only add simple XML support to their product lines to offer Web Services testing capabilities to their customers. However, over the next five years or so, Web Services herald a shift in distributed computing toward loosely coupled, standards-based, Service-oriented architectures. Testing these architectures and the Web Services that constitute them is another matter entirely. Only a few testing tool vendors have any expressed strategy for offering testing tools that work in a Service-oriented environment, and no vendors have a clear product roadmap that addresses all the Web Services testing needs that enterprises will face between now and 2006. Zapthink recommends that testing vendors evaluate their Web Services testing capabilities based not on current requirements, but upon emerging requirements for Web Services testing.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.