In a move designed to get more developers working with Web services, Microsoft announced the beta release of a new version of its SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio.
SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is based on the Extensible Markup Language and links any applications or services over the Internet. The specification was submitted by Microsoft, IBM and other co-sponsors to the World Wide Web Consortium last year. Microsoft released a first version of the toolkit for use with Visual Studio last summer. Since then, officials say there have been hundreds of thousands of downloads of the toolkit.
The company has also released a free plug-in for its Internet Explorer browser that allows developers to use Web services from scripts without needing to learn anything new.
"The goal is to make it phenomenally easy for developers and users to work with Web services without even knowing about the plumbing," said John Montgomery, Microsoft's lead product manager for the .Net Framework and Web services. "We're taking the most popular development tool and the most popular browser and basically enabling them to deal with Web services really easily."
The beta of SOAP Toolkit 2.0 and Web Services Behavior for Internet Explorer are available for free download from www.msdn.microsoft.com/soap.
What's new
Highlights of version 2.0 of the toolkit include support for UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), the Web services directory project supported by numerous vendors, and support for the latest version of WSDL (the Web Services Description Language). When the final toolkit release is ready, expected to be in the first half of the year, the toolkit also will have full product support from Microsoft.
Montgomery said the final version will be a superset of the beta release, and the company will ensure backward compatibility as .Net moves forward.
The Web Services Behavior for Internet Explorer allows developers to aggregate Web services without knowing SOAP and call a Web service like any other function. The plug-in works with Internet Explorer 5.0 or later.
"No one else has a [Web services] plug-in for the browser," Montgomery said. "I think it's going to be a while before [Netscape] can catch up."
Building a base
Thomas Murphy, an analyst and program director for the META Group, said the significance of the two releases is that Microsoft is continuing to try to build a base for its .Net strategy focused around Web services. The moves will allow Microsoft developers to begin to explore Web services, which is key to the success of the company's direction, he said.
"In order for .Net to be successful ultimately, they need to get a lot of people on board and using the new technologies that are at the core of .Net, [like] SOAP and UDDI," said Murphy. Easy access to tools for free or for a reasonable cost is crucial," he said.
While competitors like Oracle and IBM are also talking up their Web services offerings, Microsoft has a strong leadership position, Murphy said.
"Certainly from a tools perspective, they are out in advance of where most people are sitting," he said.
