For those of you who might have missed it, we put out a new release of our flagship Ipedo XIP in December. The theme was using EII in an SOA to create data services.
What we hear a lot when we're out talking to customers and prospects is that getting the data right in an SOA is hard, and that what's needed are tools to make it easier. The last thing organizations want to do is write a lot of custom Java code just to get their SOA up and running. Kind of defeats the purpose.
So what we've done is add a bunch of features to make it really simple and efficient to consume and publish Web Services. You can see the full release for details, but here are the highlights:
- One-Click Publishing – The enhanced Web Services wizard allows simple
one-click publishing of new Web Services, complete with security profiles,
performance management, and automated WSDL generation.
- Dual Caching Option – Allows a Web Services View to be cached
natively as XML, or in relational form, or both. Native caching improves
performance and allows versioning of XML results. Using the relational option
allows automatic decomposition of XML into relational form for use in other
applications.
- Web Services Tables Metadata – Metadata enhancements for Ipedo's Web
Services Tables display complete lineage and dependency information for inbound
Web Services. Ipedo's Web Services Tables allow users to easily map XML-based
Web Services into relational models.
- Join Hints for Web Services – Ipedo's query optimizer can now accept
hints, including join strategy and join order, that minimize the number of Web
Services calls needed to fulfill a query request, and thereby improve overall
performance.
- XQuery for SOA – Ipedo's XQuery engine has been tuned to provide greater insight and better performance for SOA with a range of advanced functions, including XML payload introspection, fast transformation, content validation, and service metadata introspection. In addition, XQuery can be used to trigger subsequent 'cascading queries' based on the payload content of a Web Service.
I'd also like to put in a plug for our long XQuery heritage. I think people are finally starting to realize how hard it is to deal with all the data in SOA payloads, and how good a tool XQuery is for the job.

