The Rolta SOA Center of Excellence, a software division of Rolta and provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) development solutions, today announced the availability of iPerspective, a software toolkit that automates the creation and management of web services.
Delivered as a part of Rolta's SOA solutions, this software enables fast demonstration of new services capabilities, empowering the essential IT to business communications needed to drive business value from SOA investments. As IT and business stakeholders build service-oriented environments, Rolta's iPerspective technology adapts existing systems for business users and applications to access standard service interfaces, including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST).
The toolset is designed to enable business users to build their own web services applications, Chris Ostrowski, technical manager for Rolta's SOA Center of Excellence and iPerspective, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "There is tremendous interest in web services and service-oriented architecture, but many companies lack the expertise to enable these approaches. We're seeing a lot of companies saying, 'I don't have the skill set involved. I don't have people who know Java and XML and SOAP to do all these magical web services things. That's the part that's stopping us.' "
iPerspective features a point-and-click interface that enables users to quickly create business services, the vendor says. In addition, IT professionals can rapidly build prototypes to review with business users.
iPerspective also automates the governance and management of services by providing the ability to release auditable groups of related services. For example, versioning or management with security through authentication and authorization is achieved at the data source, service, release and operation levels. iPerspective also offers the Universal Dynamic Query Service, which enables users to issue any authorized query of one or more gateways, through the business services consumer application. This capability provides a way for business applications to call one another without having to specify the exact nature of queries to be used up front.
iPerspective enables business users to access a range of enterprise databases, including DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server, Ostrowski says. "We'll be supporting AJAX in a future release," he adds. "Users are demanding full Windows functionality."
"We market this towards the C-level people inside of organizations," Ostrowski continues. "You don't need to know the gory details of complex SQL statements or preparing SOAP messages. You don't need somebody at that level. You can have them at a much higher level that addresses business process flows, such as when a customer comes in the door, let's go to our customer management system, they want to buy something, let's check credit, let's check inventory, let's check shipping. We can put the web services around all of those different systems, so they can build their workflows incredibly easily."
In March, Rolta announced SOA Today, which comprises service and software offerings that are customized to quickly deliver business results using a services-oriented approach.
For more information on SOA Today and the Rolta SOA Center of Excellence, go here.