WebMethods announced it is making
its popular Web Automation Toolkit freely available on the Internet.
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based toolkit allows organizations to
connect applications to existing Web sites and integrate business
applications directly over the World-Wide Web.
“Much of the initial coverage about XML has focused on publishing and
content management. WebMethods encourages this, but we also want to foster
greater understanding and use of XML particularly for business-to-business
e-commerce over the web. By freely distributing our Toolkit, we enable an
even larger group of developers to begin developing XML-based applications
now,” said Phillip Merrick, president and CEO of webMethods.
An integrated development, testing, and management environment, Web
Automation Toolkit 2.1 uses XML for data exchange but works with existing
HTML. It requires no corporate developer expertise in XML, but includes an
HTML/XML parser together with what the vendor says is a “groundbreaking XML
RPC that enables any application to exchange data with any other
application using just HTTP and XML.”
The free Web Automation Toolkit includes a Personal Server that supports
two users, enabling deployment of prototype applications. Both the Web
Automation Toolkit and Web Automation Server are available for all
platforms that support Java.
Anyone wishing to deploy his or her applications to larger numbers of
corporate users will need to acquire WebMethods’ Web Automation Server, the
pricing of which starts at $1,295 per concurrent user.