ORLANDO, Fla., June 5, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of the SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio® 6.0 on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN™
) developer program Web site ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/ ). The SOAP Toolkit, which includes source code, adds features to the current version of the Microsoft® Visual Studio development environment to enable the millions of developers using Visual Studio to easily build Web Services using SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol.
SOAP is an open standards-based interoperability protocol that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) to provide a common messaging format to link together applications and services anywhere on the Internet. SOAP has broad industry support from companies such as ActiveState Tool Corp., Ariba Inc., BORN Information Services Inc., Commerce One Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., DevelopMentor Inc., Extensibility Inc., IBM Corp., IONA Technologies PLC, Intel Corp., Lotus Development Corp., ObjectSpace Inc., Rogue Wave Software Inc., Scriptics Corp., Secret Labs AB, UserLand Software and Zveno Pty. Ltd, and has also been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
“As a co-submitter of the SOAP 1.1 specification to the W3C, IONA will continue to provide robust SOAP support in the iPortal Suite,”
said Annrai O’Toole, chief technology officer of IONA.
“We have found it easy and straightforward to integrate the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit with our leading CORBA-based infrastructure, Orbix 2000, and are working with Microsoft to ensure that the SOAP protocol seamlessly works with both COM, CORBA and EJB.”
The SOAP Toolkit includes features that enable developers to turn existing applications into Web Services without having to rewrite them or master the intricacies of XML. Web Services are applications that use Internet standards such as XML to expose their features while remaining neutral with respect to any operating system or programming language. The SOAP Toolkit includes wizards to turn existing Microsoft Windows® -based applications into Web Services, as well as an add-in to the Visual Studio 6.0 development system that enables developers to build applications that utilize Web Services. For example, a developer could take an existing customer relationship management application and use the SOAP Toolkit to expose its capabilities as a Web Service. Then, the developer could use the SOAP Toolkit’s Visual Studio add-in to use that Web Service from within another application, such as a database.
“The SOAP Toolkit helps developers experience the easy integration promised by Web Services and expands the capabilities of the Windows DNA 2000 platform for next-generation Web solutions,”
said Chris Atkinson, vice president for Windows DNA and Web Services at Microsoft.
“Furthermore, by including the Toolkit source code, we are enabling developers to add features to the Toolkit easily and highlighting the extensibility and openness of Web Services.”
The SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio 6.0 is available for download on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/soaptemplate.asp . The SOAP specification is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/ .
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