Mindreef Announces Availability of SOAPscope Personal 1.0 at SD East PDF Print E-mail

Industry's First Web Services Diagnostics System Helps Solve Common Web Services Problems

Boston, MA - November 19, 2002 - Mindreef, LLC announced today at SD East the availability of Mindreef SOAPscope Personal 1.0, the first offering in the company's flagship product family and the industry's first Web Services Diagnostics System. This emerging category of products addresses the challenges of isolating and solving problems of applications built with Web Services.

SOAPscope Personal 1.0 is an easy-to-use, platform-independent diagnostics aid for developers, testers and application support technicians. It provides a scalable logger and intelligent viewer for SOAP-based Web services, enabling users to quickly track and troubleshoot problems such as errant data, performance issues and interoperability issues.

"Every Web services developer and tester needs a logging and viewing tool in their toolbox to track down problems that manifest on the wire. Until now, no one has focused on this area. By combining flexible connection options, scalable logging, Web services protocol awareness and ease of use, SOAPscope Personal fills this void that has cost early adopters dearly in lost productivity," said John Robbins, co-founder of Wintellect and author of "Debugging .NET and Windows Applications."

"Any developer considering deploying a Web service-based solution with components from more than one vendor would be well advised to call Mindreef first," said Sam Ruby, Board of Directors, Apache Software Foundation.

Debugging XML Web services is different than debugging other types of applications, even classic distributed systems. When components are running on disparate systems spread across departmental or corporate boundaries, even simple problems can be very difficult to isolate. Web services are driving the need for deeper, more specialized tools that focus on the connections between loosely coupled components rather than the code in the components.

"Mindreef was formed to address the complexities inherent in Web Services-based distributed applications with a new approach to diagnostics," said Jim Moskun, co-founder of Mindreef. "But the movement toward complex, loosely coupled distributed applications is still in its infancy. Protocols, toolkits and infrastructure are all rapidly evolving as users are climbing learning curves. As a result, most Web services problems today involve point-to-point communications. SOAPscope Personal was designed with two goals in mind: provide the best feature set for early adopter problems, and help people increase their Web services knowledge by providing greater visibility and understanding of SOAP communications."


Mindreef SOAPscope Personal 1.0

Mindreef SOAPscope Personal 1.0 collects information about SOAP transactions, using it to provide visibility and insight into Web services communications. Key product features include:

  • Logging: Most logging tools store the data in memory or a flat file. SOAPscope Personal stores the log in an embedded relational database. This gives users greater flexibility when slicing, dicing and filtering to quickly locate the target messages. By embedding the database Mindreef has made installation and administration simple.
  • Connection: SOAPscope Personal offers two ways to hook into the SOAP stream for logging. Sniffer mode allows for quick and easy start-up without any code modification. For finer grained data collecting or for situations where users don't have access to a sniffable network entry point, SOAPscope Personal also supports proxy mode.
  • Pseudocode View: Pseudocode View simplifies the interpretation of XML in a SOAP packet or a WSDL file. It can reduce pages of tedious, complex XML to a few lines of pseudocode. Most of the time, viewing raw XML gets in the way. At other times, users need to see the raw XML to find a subtle problem. SOAPscope Personal provides both views.
  • Modify/Resend: Sometimes a Web service may not behave as expected and users may want to experiment with different values. If source code is accessible the user must rebuild for each try. If source code is not available it's a tougher problem. With Modify/Resend users can quickly try new values and re-send the SOAP packet to the service without leaving SOAPscope. Modify/Resend also allows for ad hoc testing of boundary and error conditions. And since the endpoint can be modified, it can be used to quickly test a service that has just been updated.
  • Debugging Annotations: One of the easiest and yet most powerful ways of debugging software is to include debug output statements in the code. This is especially useful when debugging Web services, but it is difficult to properly associate the debug message with a SOAP packet. SOAPscope's Debugging Annotations feature puts debug output statements in the log, providing message context and eliminating the need to identify what client or thread was active when the debug statement was output.

Mindreef SOAPscope Personal 1.0 is priced at $99 and is available immediately for download at www.mindreef.com Mindreef SOAPscope Professional and Team 1.0 editions are expected to be available in Q1 2003.
 
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