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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Web Services Finally Can Grow Up,
Join Workforce
iTKO Inc, a leading enterprise software development tool provider,
announced
a
major testing breakthrough to ensure that companies can deploy Web services
with confidence. By using LISA 2.0 software for Web Services testing,
developers can now deliver the quality demanded by their business sponsors on
today's most promising platform: Web Services.
LISA 2.0's Web Services Testing represents the first software to bring
fully
functional Automated Testing (AT) methodology to this cutting-edge development
field. Web services are modularly developed "mini-applications" of
functionality that can be easily strung together to support complex business
workflows. These cute, reusable apps are the next big thing on the Internet
because they can talk to each other using non-proprietary XML standards, and
provide a standard communication interface into all kinds of legacy
systems.
Industry analysts predict the continued growth of Web services initiatives,
to
the point that Web services will dominate the way systems and businesses
interact by 2007. Leading edge companies are betting on huge ROIs from the
shift. The ability to offer genuine functionality to customers through easily
distributed components that replace proprietary methods like EDI and manual
data conversion, holds the promise of more business channels at lower
cost.
But just one word stands between Web services and widespread acceptance:
quality.
"Developers will always be excited by new toys, but the consensus among the
larger firms we talk to remains the same. Web services are exciting, but
they're just not trusted to work where it matters. Either they are not
reliable enough, or they still don't talk to the right systems, or they simply
can't support the uptime and volume IT departments need," John Michelsen, CEO
of iTKO, said.
For Web services to be taken seriously in the enterprise class of
applications, they need to 'grow up and work' just like their massive e-
Commerce application brothers had to do. This means the Web Service must be
tested, tweaked and ready to run wherever they are deployed.
Automated testing was supposed to save development time by reducing errors
and
rework. Finally, LISA 2.0 Web Services Testing provides an elegant and
complete solution that involves the entire team in automated testing
throughout development, so businesses can confidently deliver mature,
industrial-strength Web Services.
"LISA already supports customers who need the most complete and powerful
automated testing for complex enterprise applications. Compared to some of the
massive scale, mission-critical J2EE transaction environments we've tested,
Web Services should be a piece of cake. But that still doesn't mean you can
afford mistakes in front of your customers. To find and correct Web services
you need testing that is aware of everything that is connected to them, all
the way to the back end," Ruston Vickers, CTO of iTKO, said.
LISA 2.0 uses an "inline testing" technology to sit alongside and talk to
any
component that can impact a Web service. Inline testing goes beyond simply
mimicking expected user behaviors, to discover both the cause and effect of
bugs that may not be visible behind the scenes. Since LISA was built to test
extreme conditions for the most demanding enterprise applications, it can
easily uncover and report the exact source of any Web service problems
stemming from Web and app servers, network transmission, database storage and
retrieval, middleware, other applications and attached components (such as
EJBs or other Web services) all the way down to the most granular Java and XML
code level.
Web services developers should take a hard look at what today's testing
tools
will actually contribute to their process. Many testing solutions claim full
error reporting, but mysteriously only provide the "effect" part of an error
-- leaving developers to guess at what the root cause of a bug might be. One
curiously over-advertised "ultimate QA for Web services" product is just an
XML feed that developers can look at by scrolling through the text. Another
testing tool only repeats the activities you click into the browser. Other
tools only work with Windows, or require learning a new scripting language
just to get started.
LISA 2.0 actually does all of the above, and a whole lot more than any
competing Web Services testing tool, in an elegant, scalable, flexible, easy
to learn, no-code environment that even non-developers can learn and run.
Developers who run and compare testing solutions inevitably find that
nothing
else comes close to LISA's Web services testing functionality, depth, breadth
and ease of use, at any price point.
"If the whole organization is going to own quality, the whole organization
must own LISA," says Jason English, iTKO's CMO. "And when you consider that
most companies have already made huge investments in AT that amount to
shelfware, we need to ensure an ROI from the first month you acquire
LISA."
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