Some of the vendors in the Web services arena are looking at the integrated service environment (ISE) as a new way to help developers create applications from services.
Gartner Inc. has introduced a Gartner Magic Quadrant report on the ISE market, listing companies such as BEA Systems Inc., WebPutty Inc., Novell Inc., Bowstreet and M7 Corp. as visionaries in this new space.
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner defines an ISE as “a suite of integrated development tools, frameworks and technologies used for building service-oriented and composite applications.”
Meanwhile, San Jose, Calif.-based WebPutty last week announced the release of WebPutty Application Platform 7.0. The new version supports Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net and IBMs Rational XDE application development and life-cycle support platforms. WebPutty 7.0 is a unified development, integration and maintenance platform.
The WebPutty Application Platform consists of the WebPutty Developer Studio and the WebPutty Server. The studio is a development environment that company officials say augments integrated development environments and modeling tools and delivers automation, integration and service-oriented architecture functionality. And it enables developers to work on database, Web services and Web user interface applications.
“What makes us unique is were not just dealing with tools, but were automating and optimizing applications after theyve been deployed,” said Terry Hanold, executive vice president of development at WebPutty.
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“WebPuttys key strength is that they offer the tools to provide a level of abstraction above each of the tiers in an n-tier architecture,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm. “In other words, a WebPutty developer is working on the presentation tier, middle tier and data tier all at once, in the same tool, without having to jump back and forth. The WebPutty Application Platform handles all the plumbing issues behind the scenes—maintaining consistency, preserving scalability, etc. Furthermore, WebPutty does it all with XML metadata—which means that the entire service-oriented architecture can be moved from one set of servers and applications to another without any recoding.”
And with the integration with Rational XDE, which supports modeling and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), “we very much leverage MDA so developers can create applications from models,” Hanold said.
Hanold said WebPutty also features automated integration, in that it automatically discovers assets and writes integration code to support them.
The WebPutty Server maintains and upgrades applications once they have been deployed, he said. The WebPutty Server also adds self-management and self-healing features to Microsofts Visual Studio .Net, Hanold said.
The WebPutty Developer Studio is free, and the WebPutty Server licenses for $35,000 per CPU.
Earlier this month, Cupertino, Calif.-based M7 released Version 3.0 of its M7 Application Assembly Suite, which includes a repository for reusing components, business processes, and Web services as well as a complete set of visual tools, the company said.
New M7 features include a model-driven persistence engine, optimized data access, new repository views, version control, cluster support and enhanced support for deployment, HTML and drag-and-drop capabilities for developing Web services and applications.
Gartner predicts the ISE market will remain stable through 2005 and will then begin to consolidate through 2007. The market will mature over the next three years, the company said in its report.
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