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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JULY 28, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 30
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Actional Updates Its Web Services
Management Platform
Actional Corporation, the Web services management market-share leader,
announced the general availability of an update to its SOAPstation Web
service broker. The new version, Actional SOAPstation 4.1, includes
sophisticated tools to seamlessly integrate management policy deployment into
the application development lifecycle; functionality enabling the management
of legacy XML-based services and accelerating the transition of those services
to Web service standards; and intelligent clustering capabilities driving
greater scalability and redundancy in mission-critical Web service
networks.
"Actional has taken a unique approach to Web services management," stated
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink. "Unlike other Web services
management solutions, which require an enterprise-wide roll out to achieve a
positive ROI, Actional enables customers to take a phased approach that yields
positive ROI at every step. Application development groups creating Web
services can implement SOAPstation at the project level. Later, the operations
team can benefit from the deployment of Actional Looking Glass. Actional's
products thus lower the risk and increase the value of building service-
oriented architectures."
Integrating Management in the Application Development Lifecycle
Actional SOAPstation 4.1, features a new set of tools for developers to
more
tightly integrate Web services management directly into their application
development processes. These tools automate the movement of management policy
between development, test and production servers, automatically updating
environmental variables that can change across staging environments. In
addition, SOAPstation 4.1 management policy files can now be checked-in and
managed by source code control systems alongside the application logic
defining service behavior.
XML Support, Broadens Management Reach and Speeds Web Services
Adoption
Actional SOAPstation 4.1 also provides support for managing XML services
created and deployed prior to the introduction of Web service standards such
as SOAP and WSDL. This helps organizations that are adopting SOA as their
application architecture to embrace and extend legacy XML services into a
well-managed service infrastructure. SOAPstation provides comprehensive
management support for these legacy services, without any service
modification. Further, SOAPstation can transform these services to standard
Web services, ensuring they have the broadest base of potential use.
Improved Scalability, Fault Tolerance for Mission-Critical
Deployments
SOAPstation 4.1 is designed to deploy in a clustered configuration in
support
of high-volume, high-demand application architectures required in industries
such as banking, financial services, retail and telecom. Organizations can
deploy multiple instances of SOAPstation across their application environment,
enabling virtually unlimited scalability, management of transaction volume,
and fault-tolerant redundancy -- all of which ensure ongoing availability and
performance of key Web services. Managing SOAPstation clusters is simplified
through SOAPstation 4.1's ability to automatically propagate updates. When a
policy change is made in any single SOAPstation instance, other cluster
members reflect that change immediately and dynamically.
"Organizations will never enjoy the cost and flexibility benefits of a
service-oriented architecture (SOA) until they have secured it and brought it
under management," said James Phillips, chief strategist and senior vice
president of Actional Corporation. "With SOAPstation 4.1 we are further
extending our technology lead in the Web services management market, providing
key capabilities that enable our customers to more quickly achieve payback
from their Web services implementations."
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