Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Sneak Preview: Mindreef's Coral

Many tools can help you develop Web services, but few can help support that development. Mindreef Coral fills the gap by making it easy for an entire team on an SOA (service-oriented architecture) project to collaborate through a Coral server. At different phases in the development process, Coral can check that a Web service complies with both external and internal standards. It also performs ad hoc and scripted regression testing, captures diagnostic information in persistent workspaces for later analysis, and even presents a community support portal for end users.

I installed Coral on a Windows 2003 Server. I created a new Coral workspace in the dedicated browser client and added a WSDL contract from the Internet. Like Mindreef's earlier SOAPscope product, Coral uses workspaces to organize all information and artifacts associated with a particular SOA project, including contracts and documentation, messages and test scripts, simulations and notes. Because it's designed for development rather than deployment, though, Coral doesn't provide any registry functions.


Good


• Supports team-oriented SOA projects
• Enforces industry and corporate standards
• Flexible ad hoc and scripted testing tools


Bad


• Lacks version control for workspaces
• No direct integration with development tools
• No integration with existing user directories

Mindreef Coral, $998 per year for server and two user licenses. Mindreef, (603) 465-2204. www.mindreef.com




Mindreef Coral: Team members can use server simulations to demonstrate the expected behavior of the Web service they're building.




Click to enlarge in another window

Getting the Work Out

  • 1