Brian Barbash @ SOA WORLD MAGAZINE

Brian Barbash

Brian R. Barbash is the product review editor for Web Services Journal. He is a senior consultant and technical architect for Envision Consulting, a unit of IMS Health, providing management consulting and systems integration that focuses on contracting, pricing, and account management in the pharmaceutical industry.

SOA Product Review: Watchfire AppScan

By Brian Barbash

Security is a major component of application development and must be tailored to the environment and audience of the system. In many respects, the more widely available an application is, the more important security becomes. Properly testing and securing Web Services applications is a ...

Feb. 11, 2007 09:45 PM Reads: 14,172 Replies: 1

SOA Web Services Product Review — Oracle Business Activity Monitoring

By Brian Barbash

Services Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and business collaboration technologies and platforms, often enabled by Web Services and orchestration constructs like BPEL, can be a tremendous business benefit. SOAs can provide the fl exibility in enterprises to adapt to rapidly changing busine...

Sep. 21, 2006 02:30 PM Reads: 16,285 Replies: 1

Java Product Review: Mindreef SOAPscope Server

By Brian Barbash

By nature Web Services is a distributed technology. With distribution comes great flexibility for architectural topologies. Components can be strategically placed in different physical locations to optimize performance, maintenance and business processes. In large organizations one phy...

Aug. 2, 2006 05:45 PM Reads: 16,764 Replies: 2

SOA Product Review: Mindreef SOAPscope Server

By Brian Barbash

Jun. 20, 2006 06:45 PM Reads: 13,047 Replies: 2

FusionWare Integration Server

By Brian Barbash

In a service-oriented architecture, the ultimate goal is to quickly and easily build new applications as composites of existing services. Building out the independent services in a manner that supports reuse is itself very challenging. However, several tools are beginning to appear to ...

Dec. 15, 2005 12:45 PM Reads: 14,164 Replies: 2

A Review Of Oracle Application Server 10g

By Brian Barbash

A number of solutions exist for creating Java-based Web services from a variety of different providers. Options range from individual processing engines that plug into existing application servers to large enterprise-class platforms in which Web services is one of many components. Each...

Dec. 2, 2005 10:45 AM Reads: 51,462 Replies: 5

BPM Suite From Bluespring Software

By Brian Barbash

In the past, business process management has not been a significant area of concern for many corporations. However, with increased regulatory scrutiny facing companies today, the need for formalized definitions, checks and balances, and management oversight is a reality.

Nov. 7, 2005 10:45 AM Reads: 16,910 Replies: 2

Stylus Studio 6 From Progress Software, An Integrated Tool With Breadth

By Brian Barbash

XML Development - the term can mean many different things given the technologies currently available. At the center of it all is XML Schemas, DTDs and instance documents. Building out from the base there's XSL, Web Services and XQuery just to name a few. Because of this, it's not uncom...

Oct. 11, 2005 11:30 AM Reads: 20,194 Replies: 3

Cordys BCP - True Collaboration SOA Web Services

By Brian Barbash

Building truly collaborative systems relationships between organizations is a daunting challenge in today's business environment. While technologies such as Web services have risen to assist, true collaboration requires a far greater set of functionality.

Sep. 7, 2005 09:15 PM Reads: 22,309 Replies: 3

Product Review: Altova Enterprise Suite 2005

By Brian Barbash

XML development is a term that can mean many things to many different people. For some, it is the modeling and creation of XML Schemas and instance documents used to exchange data. Others see it as a part of the larger effort of developing Web services. Still others view it as a means ...

Aug. 19, 2005 03:45 AM Reads: 30,503 Replies: 3

Skyway Builder from Skyway Software, An SOA Web Services Tool

By Brian Barbash

Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) rarely start from scratch. In most enterprises, they are built in gradual steps as part of an overall migration and architectural strategy. Along the way, existing legacy systems must be enhanced to support the required interface technologies, serv...

Aug. 2, 2005 02:45 PM Reads: 5,560 Replies: 3

Oracle Web Services Manager

By Brian Barbash

As departments and organizations in the enterprise adopt Web services, the importance of managing and securing, and in some cases, extending these services to partners, grows. Using a centralized platform to do it reduces the effort and cost involved, while upping security. Web Servic...

May. 26, 2005 11:00 AM Reads: 8,522

Fuego Studio 5.1

By Brian Barbash

Organizations large and small routinely face challenges in managing business processes. From an administrative standpoint, policies and procedures are put in place to ensure compliance. However, no matter how strictly they are enforced, there are always those who work outside their bou...

Jan. 4, 2005 12:00 AM Reads: 19,847

Adobe FrameMaker 7.1

By Brian Barbash

XML's surface-level simplicity hides a deceptively complex beast. At first glance, creating an XML document does not take a lot of effort. Create some tags, ensure they are well-formed, and that's it. Throw in a DTD or Schema and now there are a set of rules against which the document ...

Dec. 2, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 15,966

Forum Systems XWall Web Services Firewall

By Brian Barbash

Security is important. Anyone in the business of designing, developing, hosting, or managing business applications understands this fundamental statement. Web services present unique challenges such that the integrity and security of the content of the exchanged documents is just as im...

Oct. 1, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 17,007 Replies: 1

Oracle BPEL Process Manager

By Brian Barbash

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), while its underpinnings have been around for years, has recently become one of the most talked about topics in the IT industry. The interest in SOAs is largely due to the emergence of Web services and their ability to expose business applications th...

Aug. 3, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 42,231

Cape Clear Data Interchange 4.7

By Brian Barbash

No matter how advanced enterprise systems become, the sophistication of the tools available to build them, or the advances of architectural approaches and best practices from which to start, the life blood of any system is the raw data. Without the data, what's the point? Whether the s...

Jul. 2, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 17,002

SOAPScope 3.0 from Mindreef

By Brian Barbash

Since WSJ last looked at Mindreef's SOAPScope back in July '03 (Vol. 3, issue 7), much has been added in functionality and features to benefit the package. New items include integration with Visual Studio .NET, integration with the WS-I testing tools, a new Graph View for looking at hi...

Mar. 8, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 17,366

AmberPoint Express from AmberPoint, Inc.

By Brian Barbash

Not surprisingly, Web services management tools are quickly appearing to assist developers and system administrators alike with the maintenance of service-based applications. One such product is AmberPoint Express, a free Web services management and monitoring tool whose mission is to ...

Mar. 5, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 24,820

XMLSPY 2004 from Altova - An excellent tool gets a powerful addition

By Brian Barbash

Altova recently released the 2004 version of XMLSPY and introduced a new product, MapForce 2004. This new version includes several updates and features that will assist with Web services development while also providing a graphical XML mapping tool for data transformation.

Dec. 31, 2003 09:41 AM Reads: 15,200

WASP UDDI 4.6 - Extra features add to a solid product

By Brian Barbash

If you're looking to deploy a UDDI registry that provides strong standards support, a capable API, and security and management capabilities, look no further than Systinet's WASP UDDI version 4.6. WASP UDDI is a UDDI server that supports UDDI specification versions 1 and 2 as well as th...

Dec. 31, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 13,616

Fiorano ESB - A strong enterprise service bus solution

By Brian Barbash

Web services have staked their claim as a key technology in building and integrating large, distributed enterprise systems. More often than not, however, Web services may be just one piece of a myriad of interfaces.

Dec. 1, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 16,109 Replies: 6

Sift 1.5 by Service Integrity

By Brian Barbash

With Web services becoming more prevalent in organizations, keeping tabs on performance, analyzing problems, and managing overall quality of service is as important as ever.

Sep. 26, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 12,151

WebFace & WebFace Studio by Vultus

By Brian Barbash

As Web services proliferate and more and more applications expose their business logic in this manner, the need for effective user interfaces to consume these services grows. WebFace and WebFace Studio, from Vultus, provide a means of creating rich, Windows-like user interfaces distrib...

May. 23, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 13,518

XMLSPY 5 Enterprise Edition

By Brian Barbash

XMLSPY Enterprise Edition version 5 provides a powerful set of XML tools and utilities to develop and test XML-based applications and Web services. Several new features that expand on its XML tool base are available in this new version, including a WSDL editor, XSL stylesheet debugger,...

Nov. 18, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 14,491

AltoWeb Application Platform

By Brian Barbash

The AltoWeb Application Platform is a J2EE-compliant system designed to provide an integrated environment to develop, deploy, and manage Web-based and services-based applications. It allows developers to create applications without specific knowledge of enterprise Java and to deploy th...

May. 1, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 14,968

eXtend Composer by SilverStream

By Brian Barbash

SilverStream eXtend Composer is part of the SilverStream eXtend family that provides a visual development environment used to create service-oriented applications. Composer allows developers to create services that gather data from multiple disparate sources, apply appropriate business...

Mar. 1, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 16,572

SpiritWave from SpiritSoftA Flexible, Reliable Messaging System Tool

By Brian Barbash

SpiritWave 4.4 from SpiritSoft is a vendor-independent, JMS-compliant messaging system that provides a common interface to heterogeneous messaging systems. It supports the publish/subscribe and point-to-point messaging paradigms. To leverage existing investments in messaging systems, S...

Jan. 11, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 14,597

CapeConnect Two for J2EEby Cape Clear

By Brian Barbash

Two distinct initiatives have come to the forefront as means by which applications can be presented as Web-based services: Microsoft's .NET and the J2EE platform. Application servers and toolsets are beginning to tailor themselves to the Web services paradigm as the concept matures...

Nov. 30, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 14,749

Product Review: zeroCode

By Brian Barbash

ZeroCode is a Web-based development environment that allows a team to graphically develop a Web-based database application with minimal handwritten code. The development environment is Web-based and housed on zeroCode servers. Developers build the application via the Web interface and ...

May. 1, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 13,882

WebKing 2.0 by ParaSoft Corporation

By Brian Barbash

ParaSoft's WebKing 2.0 Web testing software is a tool to assist developers in testing and deploying dynamic Web sites. It applies traditional C/C++ and Java testing techniques to the Web environment to identify a multitude of potential errors in a site. WebKing also provides a publishi...

Dec. 1, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 15,495