Nexaweb Unveils Enterprise Web 2.0 and SOA Ecosystem Program

June 28, 2007; 01:40 AM

SOAWorld 2007 Conference & Expo – New York, NY, June 26, 2007

Nexaweb^® Technologies, Inc., provider of the leading standards-based platform for building and deploying Enterprise Web 2.0 (EW2.0) applications, today unveiled Web2SOA™ – a newly formed Enterprise Web 2.0 & SOA Ecosystem Program designed to help customers capitalize on their SOA initiatives and quickly deliver rich, reliable and governed Enterprise Web 2.0 (EW2.0) and Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBA) to end-users via the Web.

According to a recent Gartner forecast the worldwide market for SOA, Web services and Web 2.0 reached $41 billion in 2006, and will grow to $140 billion by 2011. Additionally a Gartner survey also found that 25% of companies were using web 2.0 style services and of these more than 47% of respondents were engaged in some phase of enterprise ‘mash-up’ projects at the end of last year. Close to 50% of those who are using or planning to use web 2.0 style services will use application development tools and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) in the next 12 months. However, among companies who were doing projects involving web services and web 2.0 style services, the survey also found an absence of best practices among respondents in areas such as:  an SOA center of excellence (only 27%), an SOA governance process (only 19%), use of a registry product (only 27%), and a published list of reusable components (only 25%)[1].

“Because the movement of Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise is inevitable, IT organizations must take an active role in the strategy and execution of Enterprise Web 2.0 (EW2.0) implementations,” Gartner stated. “To deliver Web 2.0 capabilities as an enterprise asset, IT organizations can create enterprise-strength Web 2.0 ecosystems, rather than face a future of inheriting a loose portfolio of isolated and expensive Web-based tools that have emerged from disjointed, grass-roots user adoption.  An IT-delivered enterprise ecosystem enables IT to manage a Web 2.0 application's performance, security, change management, integration, promotion and support associated with enterprise-class systems.  One strength of Web 2.0 is the inherent integration capabilities of Web architecture, including XML, RSS, Atom and SOA."[2]

·         Governance: As more and more Enterprises roll out their service oriented architecture, it becomes increasingly important that the complete application development stack can work within a SOA governance framework. Nexaweb works with best-of-breed SOA Governance frameworks by integrating design-time and run-time features into the Nexaweb Studio and Nexaweb Platform respectively.

“The key to successful SOA projects is to understand and control your SOA artifacts, which can include services, SOA policies, processes and profiles” stated Gartner. “The key to understanding and controlling these artifacts is SOA governance. Various technologies are available to help you control how your artifacts are being used, how they are managed, how they are secured, how they are tested and how visible they are.”[3]

·         Infrastructure: Consumption of services is a critical part of building Enterprise Web 2.0 and SOBA applications.  Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform is architected to provide developers with a secure, governable, and extensible way to create these applications.  Architecturally, Nexaweb is designed to route service requests through the application host. Developers can add “pre” and “post” processing business logic to handle things such as, user input validation, caching, data integrating checking, and data transformation. 

·         Service Composition & Orchestration: For the most part enterprises have been utilizing services at this layer either through utilizing a BPEL layer or bringing services together at the data tier.  Nexaweb can interact with the orchestration layer through an API or SOAP interface. 

·         Testing: Testing is critical to application development, and with Nexaweb development teams can work standard application testing tools such as Parasoft into the development process. This allows teams that are building EW2.0 and SOBA applications to have a way to Unit Test the input and output to services calls.  Developers can use Web Service testing tools to mimic the service call.  This allows testing teams to perform specific input and output testing scenarios to ensure proper application results.

·         Tooling: Development teams are looking to build applications cheaper, better quicker.  Nexaweb provides development teams with a comprehensive set of tools packaged into the Nexaweb Studio product.  Once installed Nexaweb Studio gives developers access to all the tools they need to build end-to-end SOBA applications.  Included in the Studio IDE are Eclipse top-level projects such as:  Data Tools Project and Web Tools Project that provide developers with the ability to explore databases and design service-based applications. 

Nexaweb provides its own plug-ins to discover services and bind a service call’s input and output to the UI using a simple drag and drop metaphor.  Along with Nexaweb specific and Eclipse projects, Nexaweb Studio includes 3^rd party tools such as:  oXygen XML editors to provide developers with the functionality need to build every aspect of an SOBA application.

·         System Integration:  Nexaweb is working with a number of SOA practices at many of the world’s largest System Integrators to align our technology and services with their own. Our System Integrator partners have been on the front-lines of their customers SOA-initiatives, and are now focused on helping those customers harvest the benefit of that investment through new and/or modernized applications that can consume SOA services.  Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform is well suited for use as a SOA consumption and deployment solution that is helping these partners rapidly build composite applications that offer compelling value and ROI to their customers SOA investments.

Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web 2.0

Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions enable enterprises to rapidly deploy Richer, Thinner, Faster applications over the Web.  With Nexaweb, building Ajax and Java UI applications that access legacy and service-oriented data systems is simple and doesn’t require re-writing code.  And only Nexaweb’s EW2.0 solution is proven by more than 5,000 successful global deployments.  Founded in February 2000 and rooted in the MIT community, Nexaweb is based in Burlington, Massachusetts. The company is privately held and funded by institutional investors.  For more information, visit www.nexaweb.com or call (781) 345-5500.