AmberPoint Tuesday unveiled the next piece to its strategy to gain developer
mindshare by launching a developer’s edition of its Web services management
platform that is tailored for the Microsoft .NET framework to let users
seamlessly manage Web Services right from Visual Studio.
AmberPoint Express provides includes performance feedback, monitoring and
logging, as well as testing features for Web services to help developers
gain insight into the performance and reliability of their Web services
before they roll them out for public consumption. The .NET version of
AmberPoint Express executes in native Visual C# and uses the Web services
system libraries of the Microsoft common language runtime (CLR).
AmberPoint, who is joining Microsoft at its Professional Developer’s
Conference in Los Angeles Tuesday to announce its news, has tightly
integrated this version of its developer’s edition with Visual Studio .NET.
Moreover, AmberPoint unveiled a customized version of Express for the next
version of Visual Studio at PDC.
Ed Horst, vice president of marketing for the Oakland, Calif.-based concern,
said AmberPoint Express requires no modifications to the Web services code,
the client code or the SOAP messages.
“This is a developer-oriented approach to makes sure steps are not
overlooked,” Horst told internetnews.com, noting that developers may
sometimes skip over steps. AmberPoint Express requires no special coding,
which saves programmers time. “With a single click, a developer can test run
Web services in Visual Studio.”
Web services management is considered one of the great barriers to wholesale
adoption of Web services, which help applications communicate one another to
efficiently carry out tasks, such as processing purchase orders. Horst said
his company’s new Express software provides the functionality developers
have been asking for to monitor,
analyze and fine-tune their Web services on the .NET Framework. This helps
validate their projects — assurances that don’t come easy but are seen as
important by customers.
Horst said specific features help programmers discover and manage Web
services automatically, divine Web service problems and analyze messages in
XML formats. Users may also test programs with auto-generated or logged
messages and
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at research concern ZapThink, said
AmberPoint is one of the few Web Services management vendor to offer tools
for developers and testers to use as they’re building Web Services and noted
that they are entering the development and testing tools space populated by
such startups as Cape Clear, Parasoft, and Mindreef. AmberPoint also
competes with the likes of Actional and Confluent Software.
“AmberPoint is clearly trying to build mindshare among developers with the
goal of upselling to their full management suite,” Bloomberg told
internetnews.com.
AmberPoint Express will be generally available later this quarter while an
early version of AmberPoint Express that works with current versions of
Visual Studio .NET will be offered free to all attendees at PDC in Los
Angeles.
Meanwhile, a customized version of AmberPoint management software will be
distributed with the next commercial release of Microsoft Visual Studio,
code named “Whidbey.”