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Sneak Preview: Mindreef's Coral: Page 3 of 4

Additionally, there's capability here that I haven't seen elsewhere: You can simulate a Web service server in Coral by building a series of "reactions." Each reaction is a request-response pair that represents how the Web service would respond to some input if it actually existed. Thus a designer can show what's going to be built to the rest of the team in advance of the code being written, and QA can start writing tests before coding is done.

If you're facing a problem with a portion of your architecture after deployment, Coral lets your tester create a shared workspace populated with problem messages, contracts and other relevant artifacts that can be passed around to developers and support engineers.

Mindreef also supplies an independent Collector service that intercepts and records SOAP traffic on the server and forwards it back to your Coral server, where it can be integrated into a workspace for further analysis. This provides a relatively nonintrusive way to work with problems on a production server.

Coral Management

Coral runs as a standalone Web application on its own embedded Tomcat server. You can't host it on any other server. Persistent data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) database by default. If you have more than a handful of users, you'll want to upgrade this to a full SQL Server database (and you'll need to consider the SQL Server licensing fees when looking at the tool's ROI). The Tomcat server shouldn't need maintenance, but you'll want to back up the database just like any other critical data.