Designing and testing XML Web services pose special challenges to organizations and enterprises; challenges that are uniquely addressed by rapid prototyping with Steam XML. Typically, Web services involve multiple evolving standards and APIs, a variety of XML encoding styles, and numerous languages and technologies. Web services can be especially hard to completely test and understand before they are fully deployed. On the other hand, because Web services are extremely difficult and expensive to modify after they are deployed, it is particularly important to resolve conceptual flaws early in the process. The concept of rapid prototyping is the solution to these challenges.

With Steam XML, you can quickly create prototypes that will speed your development and deployment of XML Web services. The prototype enables you to get fast feedback from the consumers of your Web services. You can use prototype services to easily generate sample XML data with multiple XML encoding styles, test the APIs, and gain quick insight into the implementations. Steam XML can generate sample XML data to locally or remotely test your services. Steam XML can even automatically generate both the test batteries and the documentation that goes with it. In short, Steam XML gives you a quick, but thorough understanding of your XML Web services.

Steam XML eliminates the need to program in multiple languages and technologies, and instead provides a single, interactive environment, especially designed for Web services and XML. It provides the conditional logic necessary to run a thorough range of test cases. And since changing requirements are inherent in prototype development, Steam XML is designed to easily and interactively implement changes.

Benefits Of Rapid XML Web Services Prototyping

Rapid software prototyping is proving a powerful way to test software concepts, gain consensus on requirements, dramatically shorten the overall design cycle, and insure that when applications are deployed, they generate maximum revenue. Here is a summary of rapid prototyping benefits.

• Deploy Web services applications quicker and at much lower cost
• Get the requirements right, before expending heavy resources
• Exact requirements are rarely understood until the system is experienced
• Documents alone are inadequate for understanding requirements
• Prototypes bring the requirements to life
• Finalize the requirements quicker with a prototype
• Uncover conceptual flaws early
• The costs of errors rise exponentially as projects progress
• Understand the application impact on all departments
• Get the software finished sooner to accelerate the revenue benefits

Steam XML Is the Best Solution for Web Services Rapid Prototyping

• Provides a single, interactive environment to create a complete prototype of your Web services application
• Based on universally understood HTML and XML
• Built from the ground up for XML and Web services
• Accommodates change interactively
• Easily generates a range of data formats: comma separated values, html, plain text, SOAP, JavaScript
• Includes the conditional logic necessary to generate multiple test cases
• Designed around an object system that makes it easy to change the granularity of services