The success of any such initiative is also dependent on the development environment and its support for building Web services. There's a multitude of new standards in play, and all the products we tested try to minimize the need for you to learn these standards, thus making your foray into the Web services world painless. The degree to which a development environment is seamlessly integrated with the target deployment platform is crucial, as is the product's ability to develop Web services rapidly--with minimal training. If a product can generate the framework and require only that the developer write business logic code and push a button to deploy, it has the chops to move your developers into the world of Web services.
As for security, we were disappointed in the general lack of support for XML-SIG and XML-Encryption in almost every product we tested. We understand the reluctance of most vendors to include support for
WS-Security--it's still under development--but XML-SIG, albeit still a work in progress, has been available since 1999, and XML-Encryption appeared in 2001. Both BEA and Sun have indicated that support for both standards will be available in their next product incarnations, while others are waiting for finalization of WS-Security before offering support.
Taking all this into consideration, we gave our Editor's Choice award to Novell's Extend 4.0. for its appearance, easy-to-follow Web services development and management, and broad range of features. BEA's WebLogic 7.0 was hot on Extend's trail, followed closely by Cape Clear's CapeConnect.
Novell got itself a winner with its acquisition of SilverStream's Extend. Rebranded as Novell Extend, this application server offers both the corporate-class functionality required of an enterprise application and the features we'd expect for successful deployment of Web services.
Extend uses the standard J2EE deployment model, but the ease with which this is accomplished astounded us. The ability to deploy from an IDE to an application server is standard in most development environments that complement an application server, but configuration can be challenging, and getting it to work right the first time is always a chore.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
