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Coral Bridges Islands Of Web Services


Mindreef envelops the enterprise with collaborative SOA life-cycle tool

By Edward J. Correia
December 15, 2005 — 
Moving a company to a service-oriented architecture can involve barriers not only of technology, but of politics as well. Human resources departments are understandably cautious, for example, about exposing their roles to applications running in other departments, let alone the Internet at large.

That’s why Web services testing tool maker Mindreef created Coral, a role-based collaborative environment unveiled on Dec. 5 that permits people from across an enterprise to participate in the construction and maintenance of Web services regardless of their technical skill level.

The browser-based platform runs atop Apache’s Tomcat servlet engine and Microsoft’s SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE), both included in the platform’s price of US$499 per concurrent user per year (there’s a two-seat minimum).

Coral consists of four main components: Foundational Governance permits creation of the WSDLs and schema that ensure adherence to corporate policies and custom rules through all phases of development and deployment. Multirole Testing includes functional, regression and interoperability testing capabilities that are usable by any department and role. Collaborative Diagnostics offers deep analysis of Web services through platform-native SOAP traffic collectors and Web services simulation for offline testing. Life-cycle Support handles ongoing application maintenance and end-user documentation and support.

According to Jim Moskun, Mindreef’s chief strategy officer and one of its founders, in order to implement a service-oriented architecture across an organization, technical and nontechnical people from multiple departments and roles must collaborate. “We approached it in a way that would be useful to business analysts, but also let you drill down [to the code level] if you’re an architect or service developer.”

Mindreef president and co-founder Frank Grossman described how the governance module might work. “A company might need to follow

WS-I kinds of rules, or [dictate that] ‘our namespaces need to follow these rules.’ These kinds of things can be coded into Coral” by nontechnical people. WS-I’s Basic Profile 1.0 and other best practices are built in. “A coder would then create the service and the WSDLs for using that service. Then they bring it into Coral so all can see that it conforms with the rules.”

Once schemas are created, Grossman said that Coral also helps communicate the purpose of the system’s XML-based applications to the nontechnical members of the team. “Coral generates the pseudocode and other things that help people understand what the service is and supposed to do.” And simulation permits Web services testing from a WSDL. “This way people can play with that service before any code is written and understand what it’s really about.”

When it’s time to begin writing code, Grossman continued, the service developers can use their normal development tools. “They’re able to create unit tests as they go along inside the Coral server. Instead of pretending they’re the client, they can use Coral as the client,” to test and debug the service as it’s being built, he said.

The benefits of collaboration become apparent, Moskun said, as services go into beta testing and production, particularly when those services depend on another part of the company to run.

“As things get more separated, the need for collaboration gets more important,” asserted Grossman, of the increased need for cooperation among departments brought about by SOA. “When someone finds a problem, Coral will contain everything needed to reproduce the problem and everybody can look at it from the same point of view. No matter whether it’s a C++ or COBOL program, they can understand it in the same way,” added Moskun. He said that in a typical installation, a company will deploy one Coral server in each department participating in the Web service(s).

Available now, Coral has been tested only on Windows servers, but Moskun said the all-Java solution should theoretically run anywhere. The software also may be licensed for $1,500 per user plus 18 percent annual maintenance.


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