Weaving a Web services web into its content management
software, Interwoven 6, Interwoven
officials announced the inclusion of .NET support in
its developer toolkit.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., company is one of a handful who have tied its
client-based content management software into the two
main Web services
Microsoft’s .NET and Sun
Microsystem’s J2EE
With the Interwoven SDK, developers can now customize
their applications with .NET framework tools. The
support will be available next week, when the company
makes ContentServices 2.0 generally available. CS 2.0
is what officials at Interwoven call the “most
comprehensive” services-oriented architecture for
integrating enterprise applications, letting .NET
developers integrate content management into custom
portals, CRM and ERP applications.
Bringing the two competing Web services frameworks
into Interwoven’s SDK was made possible through the
WSDL 1.1
process despite the many similarities between Java
object-oriented programming languages behind J2EE and
.Net.
Darren Knipp, Interwoven group product manager, said
his company has spent the past 12-18 months working on
its code to bring .NET onto their platform, a process
that was relatively painless.
“We’ve taken care of most of that through our adherence to the WSDL 1.1 specification and testing to make sure our data types were compatible with the way the .NET framework looks at them,” Knipp said. “There’s a couple of tools within the .NET framework to convert our WSDLs and convert them to one of the supported languages, either Visual Basic or C#. Or within Visual Studio .Net, you can just add a Web preference to move the URL to one of our WSDL files and then you can use the Web preference to include in the source code.”
In addition to the Web services support, Interwoven
now enjoys better access to Microsoft’s Office, SQL
Server, IIS and Commerce Server products.
The end result is broad support for .NET and J2EE in
their toolkits, something many customers don’t really
understand but are becoming much more interested use.
“So far, from our customer’s standpoint, they’re not
really at the leading edge as far as Web services
adoption, they’re more content management customers
per se,” Knipp said. “But over the past three or four
months, as we started talking about our upcoming
release of Content Services 2.0, we’ve seen a dramatic
increase in their interest in Web services as a whole.
“I really think it’s more of them getting used to the
market, and the fact that Web services are here to
stay and that if they want a program in Java or a
program in C Sharp our Web services toolkit will
eliminate a lot of the plumbing chores that are
typically necessary to do that,” he added.
Interwoven will also release an upgraded TeamSite,
version 6, next week in conjunction with
ContentServices 2.0. TeamSite lets developers
manipulate any type of content now including, of
course, Visual Basic, C# and ASP filetypes.
