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Sneak Preview: Mindreef's Coral: Page 2 of 4

Workspaces are persistent and can be private or shared. You also can store workspaces in a community area, which is public and advertised through an RSS feed. This can be useful if your organization has many SOA initiatives under way and you want to publicize new pieces as they are developed. Workspaces also can be exported to files, but given their importance as a repository for development information, it would be nice if Mindreef incorporated an explicit version-control interface in a future release.

One of the important tasks when you're building up an SOA is setting corporate standards. Coral makes it easy for you to take the next step of enforcing these standards, whether you want to adhere to the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability) Basic Profile (which is built in) or to your own corporate rules. With a few mouse clicks I got back a report telling me that my WSDL contract was largely in compliance with WS-I.

With problem areas highlighted, another two mouse clicks took me directly to the offending section of the WSDL. Creating your own rules requires knowing XPath and JavaScript. Once you've created rules, they're easy to share across workspaces and Coral servers.

Testing and Teamwork

Coral's testing facilities are flexible. You can view requests and responses independently as pseudocode, raw XML, color-coded XML, or in a tree view of elements and attributes. Coral also lets you record every bit of ad hoc testing as a permanent part of your workspace, making it simple to build regression scripts and even multistep scripts. Beyond that, you can build variables into your scripts for increased flexibility at runtime.