Web Services Development

Competitive Enterprises Are Focused on Web Services Development

Web services development is an increasingly important aspect of enterprise competitiveness. As the business world grows more interconnected and more business services are provided over the Internet, the quality and operational responsiveness of Web applications will help an enterprise maintain or increase market share. But the world of Internet application development is constantly evolving, and to keep up the enterprise must have the tools to more easily manage the creation, deployment and integration of new applications. For leading enterprises around the globe, Progress Software provides superior tools for Web services development.

Progress Software Offers Leading Web Services Development Solution

Progress Software offers competitive enterprises the most flexible, reliable and integrated platform for business applications available today. Our Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite is an integrated suite of solutions for developing, deploying, integrating and managing solutions more efficiently, delivering greater return on investment. Existing customers leverage our legacy product, Progress® OpenEdge®, offers an innovative environment for developing Web services applications. Balancing productivity with flexibility, we enable developers to create multi-page Internet Transaction Processing (ITP) programs with little or no coding, dramatically reducing the time it takes for development while preserving the ability to customize programs when necessary. Developers can create applications while connected to a Web server and the WebSpeed Transaction Server, a robust server for deploying ITP applications with high availability, greater scalability and rapid response rates. By performing Web services development in the environment that the application will run in, developers can minimize surprises, bugs and test/fix/test cycles.

Web Services Development and Security Issues

As Web services proliferate and different business processes share the same service, however, they give rise to management challenges and security risks because of their heterogeneous implementations; their connections across multiple departments and, even, enterprises; and, in many cases, their exposure on the public Internet.

Because Web services are loosely coupled and reused in diverse business processes (by a wide range of consumers) across heterogeneous systems, there is no inherent way to monitor performance and understand service interactions and dependencies. As a result, it's difficult for IT administrators to:

• Spot and analyze the root cause of variations in performance, to detect and resolve issues.
  
  
• Find and control rogue services to keep sensitive information out of the hands of unauthorized consumers and ensure systems aren't overloaded with unplanned users.
  
  
• Enforce sagreements (SLAs) and provision services to meet specific consumer needs in order to align IT with the business.
  
  
• Ensure consistent security and compliance enforcement across services subject to differing security requirements and standards in different uses—and avoid having something fall through the cracks.
  
  

These are not trivial issues. For example, failures in managing Web service performance and availability can result in lost revenue and productivity and penalties for violating SLA. Failure to enforce the right type of security on a Web service may expose sensitive information and even violate important rules, such as the European Union privacy laws.

Proven Tools Help Streamline Development of New Web Services

The Progress® RBI is a comprehensive integration suite that extends the agility of service orientation to include flexible data and policy change. Organizations can design new business capabilities for continuous change, with increased information transparency and integration integrity across distributed IT and federated SOA deployments. For ISVs, indirect partners and systems integrators, Progress RBI transforms into a suite of modular, best-of-breed integration products that can extend the market opportunity functionality, and data interoperability of the software and services.OpenEdge provides developers with a powerful set of tools for more efficient Web services development. 

Progress RBI helps close the gap between business needs and IT delivery by providing. Core technology that power RBI include:

• Enterprise Service Bus
  Progress® Sonic® ESB provides flexible integration and re-use of business applications within an SOA. It connects, mediates and orchestrates services wherever they are deployed. Sonic ESB eliminates brittle point-to-point integration and provides a robust, event-driven architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the enterprise.
• SOA Management
  Progress® Actional® SOA Management provides end-to-end visibility and control across a distributed, multi-vendor SOA environment.
• Data Interoperability
  Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI) simplifies the creation, maintenance and governance of common-model based data services in an SOA. It ensures semantic consistency across the multiple, complex, and ever-changing data models in a service-oriented architecture.

Progress also provides business integration software, solutions for software architecture, and a development environment incorporating an Eclipse plugin that is a powerful alternative to VB6 development.