Cape Clear Crafts SOA Tool

In a move geared to boost interest in the burgeoning Web services development, Cape Clear Software Tuesday released a free service-oriented architecture (SOA) editor to give programmers an improved environment to develop such services.

The SOA Editor from the Waltham, Mass., software maker includes automated wizards for development tasks, support for Web Services standards, testing tools, support for the XML Schema Definition, and documentation to help programmers get up and running quickly.

SOAs define a means of building software services that can be accessed, shared, and reused across a network. They define how computing entities, such as applications, interact in such a way as to enable one to perform a service for another. Based on a description language, such as WSDL , each interaction, or service, is independent of any other, making them “loosely coupled.”

SOAs, a network architecture discarded by many in the ’80s, mirror the way Web services work. But SOAs differ in that most Web services implementations are hard-coded point-to-point connections that cannot be “discovered” by UDDI. In an SOA implementation, information about the Web service and how to connect to it is published in a UDDI directory, which means a Web service can be easily discovered and used in other applications.

Microsoft, IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems, to name a few, are among the many companies embracing SOAs as their main driver for the development of Web services in their products. Even though these companies are touting the technology, Cape Clear CTO John McGuire said an SOA Editor is necessary because “while most vendors talk about SOA, they’re doing nothing to support the creation and deployment of services.”

“If you want to build software services, you don’t start with the programming language, rather you start with the definition of what the service is and what the service does,” McGuire said in a public statement. “The SOA Editor provides developers with an on-ramp for SOA – and it’s available today.”

The SOA Editor simplifies the creation of WSDL and couples those tools with support for standards, development wizards and extensive support for XML Schema. The SOA Editor is completely integrated with Cape Clear’s Business Integration Suite, which integrates applications and data using SOA.

Other features of SOA Editor include the ability to edit and print WSDL files to simplify the development process; full support for XML Schema, WSDL 1.1 and SOAP; and the ability for developers to include MIME and non-XML attachments in their service definitions.

The SOA Editor, which runs on Linux, Windows and Solaris, can be downloaded here.