A favorite dot-com-era TV commercial of mine depicts several young entrepreneurs eagerly watching a ticker for their first e-commerce transaction. Their initial cheers and high-fives quickly faded into dead silence as the transactions started mounting into the millions. How could they fulfill all of those orders? Now, imagine corporate IS managers watching the growing number of specialized Web services spring up across the enterprise. How can they centrally manage all those services?

Following SOAPswitch, its successful initial Web services product, Actional has announced a new product aimed at bringing order to the complex back-end configurations required to service a wide variety of specialized business partner-based Web services. SOAPstation is an entirely configurable, rule-based engine designed to address many corporate IS concerns when a SOAP request traverses the network.

To begin, SOAPstation is a Web service proxy, which means that it will handle a SOAP request on behalf of the actual service point, do some processing, and then forward the request to the real service.

To better understand SOAPstation's capabilities, let's follow the path of a Web service SOAP request as SOAPstation processes it through a series of message-processing blocks called a service group.

SOAPstation starts by authenticating the SOAP request, using a variety of configurable security methods such as HTTPS certificates and SAML assertions. Once the SOAP request is authenticated, it will go through a transformation-processing block, where you might have some predefined data transformation take place so that the message complies with an internal service format.

Next, an access control processing block will determine what information, if any, the SOAP request is authorized to access. If not authorized, SOAPstation will kick back the appropriate SOAP response. Next, the SOAP request will pass through an interception block, a kind of configurable event driver that allows certain actions to take place when certain rules are met in the SOAP request message.

Finally, the SOAP message moves through a routing processing block. Here, depending on the data contained in the request, or other factors such as date and time, the SOAP request will be routed to the appropriate managed service. Before this happens, the SOAP request may go through an additional transform that is specific to the managed service. The SOAP response message will take a similar path through SOAPstation on its return trip.

In addition to being able to monitor Web service traffic, the SOAPstation Admin Console provides you with the capability to set up and configure a wide variety of rules using simple wizard-based configuration screens. In fact, the entire process of setting up a managed Web service is very straightforward and can be achieved in most cases in a few minutes. The exception will be for some of the more complex rules or transformations where you may need to throw in some custom Java code or XSL transformations.

SOAPstation also provides built-in facilities for adding instrumentation and logging to your managed services. For instance, you can easily set up rules for a service that allow you to e-mail an administrator when certain events take place in the message flows, such as increases in error counts or network timeouts.

Conclusion
SOAPstation is designed to bring order to the complex decisions that are required when processing Web service requests, and provides the ability for corporate IS to scale Web service offerings across the enterprise in a organized and controlled manner. It was generally available in late 2002.

Author Bio
Joe Mitchko is a technology specialist for a leading Internet service company and is product review editor and a contributing writer for Web Services Journal. joe@sys-con.com