Product Reviews
Use CapeStudio to Integrate Web Services
Integrated development environment simplifies enterprise plumbing.
Sometimes it seems like development today bears a marked resemblance
to plumbing: the major activity is to stick things together using a variety
of middleware. If this describes your development day, you'll want to
take a look at CapeClear's CapeStudio, a RAD environment for working with
web services and XML-based applications. In a JRE-based environment, it
allows you to work with protocols such as XML, XSLT, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI
using a series of sensible dialog boxes and drag-and-drop editing. CapeStudio
can perform a variety of tasks. For starters, it makes generating XSLT
files to map one XML file to another very simple. You can view node trees
for two XML files on the interface, and create mappings through drag-and-drop
operations. You can modify mappings with calculated expressions, lookup
tables, and other advanced features. But that's just the start.
CapeStudio also features the WSDL Assistant for working with Web Services
Description Language files. The WSDL assistant takes the WSDL and generates
a Visual Basic or Java proxy file that can build the correct SOAP messages
to interact with the web service. (Another of CapeClear's products, CapeConnect,
extends this by allowing you to generate WSDL from Enterprise JavaBeans,
CORBA objects, or Java classes). Thus if you're a VB or Java developer,
you can get up and running quickly by using CapeStudio to generate the
"glue" to use web services from application code that you already understand.
Finally, CapeStudio includes a UDDI Registry Browser that can help you
find and use web services that are listed in one of the registries that
are springing up around the net. Once you get the basic notions of web
services down (and there is some excellent tutorial material included
with CapeStudio), this product makes it easy to incorporate them into
your existing development. It works well and makes managing those tedious
plumbing chores much simpler for the experienced developer who wants to
get into web services with a minimum of fuss.
You can download a 14-day trial version from CapeClear's web site if
you want to check it out.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.