The choice looks relatively straightforward: spend money on maintaining and upgrading email systems for college students, or participate in a Google or Microsoft program that provides student email and other web-based applications for free.

For habitually cash-strapped colleges, selecting Windows Live @ Edu or Google Apps Education Edition makes sense. Andy Guess at Inside Higher Ed suggested such outsourcing will become the standard at most institutions over the next few years.

Both Google and Microsoft have been rapidly gaining converts, as Guess noted:

Jeff Keltner, Google’s enterprise specialist for collaboration products, said institutions at six of the seven continents use its education services, with several hundred thousand active users logging in at a regular basis from several thousand campuses around the world.

The senior product manager for Microsoft’s Live @ edu program, Bruce Gabrielle, said the company has some 450 higher education clients, which ballooned from 300 since the end of June. “A lot of awareness is spreading virally,” he said.

Microsoft and Google have similar aims in mind: build brand loyalty with students and hope they can keep it once he or she graduates. Today’s Gmail or Live @ Edu user could be tomorrow’s regular viewer of advertising on the company’s other properties. Or even a corporate decision-maker opting to spend money with the two Internet rivals.

Guess also cited the trend toward other web-based applications for higher education, where software as a service has made inroads where shrinkwrapped or home-brewed applications once dominated the landscape.

Campus IT staff may not like the outsourcing trend, but the cash savings will be significant enough that more campuses will consider it. Universities have generous Internet connections and a student body that expects more than a basic email account during their attendance.

The schools look like they are willing to let Google or Microsoft fulfill those expectations.

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The power of using services as a means to create large connected systems are enormous but sometimes it can be a performance bottleneck.

The SOAP protocol in ASP.NET is defined as a response/request operation even if the method returns a void type.

That means that the requesting client waits until it gets a response from the web service and that can take a relative long time.

For simple logging applications or other simple SOAP calls where you aren’t interested in waiting for the response, you can achieve performance gains by using the SoapDocumentMethod attribute on the web service methods.

What it does is that it instantly returns HTTP status code 200 OK to the requesting client, so it doesn’t have to wait for the entire request to finish processing and it’s built directly into the ASP.NET engine. Here is how to do it:

[WebMethod, SoapDocumentMethod(OneWay = true)]

}

It’s not exactly rocket science but it can remove a potential bottleneck.

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

The company’s product line allows business users, business analysts, QA engineers, sales engineers, consultants, and developers to quickly and easily test and certify new web services, business processes and applications. Gardner is an industry veteran with more than 30 years in the enterprise software industry.

1. For business executives who may not be that attuned to technology, explain in plain English what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is and how it differs from traditional software development and testing approaches.

SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. Modern application architectures have evolved from mainframe and client/server architectures so that enterprise applications can be delivered over the Web. The architectural idea is that the software will be composed of a set of loosely coupled components (called services) that exchange messages across the Web to do work. While there are hotly debated variations in approach and terminology (SOA, REST, Composite Applications, Web 2.0, etc.) there is deep consensus that XML Messaging and Services are the basic building blocks of new Web applications. Visual Tools available from many vendors allow NEW business processes to be very quickly composed and modified combining Services over the Web.

This new architecture runs on shared computing resources (cluster or grid) giving large cost savings over the previous generation. The enterprise gets a flexible, scalable, ON DEMAND processing infrastructure that can be easily integrated with existing applications and customized for that enterprises’ needs. Every leading software application vendor is moving rapidly to deliver versions of their products to enable this approach.

2. Your web site describes SOASTA’s approach as “revolutionary.” What’s revolutionary about it?

Testing is a complex and very detailed activity requiring the tester to design test scenarios. Existing testing tools are script-based which means that you write code (JAVA, C#, Perl or a proprietary scripting language) in order to construct and execute the tests. So, the tester writes script code to test the application code. This a tedious, time consuming and expensive process.

SOASTA provides an easy to use product for testing web-based services and applications. The objective is to substantially reduce the effort and technical expertise necessary to create and execute complex parallel message scenarios necessary to test new Web applications. That is accomplished in SOASTA Concerto by providing a suite of visual tools designed to automate all of the tasks necessary to test Web applications.

SOASTA Concerto uses a NEW and REVOLUTIONARY visual approach borrowed from the world of digital media creation. It is very similar to products like Apple’s Final Cut Pro or iMovie. In a digital movie, video and sound clips are arranged in a drag-and-drop multi track mixing board in order to control the sequence and timing of the final video. Transition effects like fades and special effects are specified. Similarly, in SOASTA Concerto, the test designer visually creates messages, combines messages into message clips and arranges the clips in a drag-and-drop multi-track mixing board in order to control the sequence and timing of the test composition. Complex, parallel message streams are quickly and easily created without writing code.

Visual approaches to solving complex problems are much easier to show than to describe. Please visit http://www.soasta.com in order to see a short video demonstrating the power of these visual tools.

3. What are the business benefits that customers can expect from SOASTA’s environment?

SOASTA Concerto is offered as a hosted service and on a monthly subscription basis for in-house use. The application is delivered via any Web browser using AJAX technology over the Web. Customer benefits include dramatic productivity gains in building tests and certifying Web applications (no coding or scripting required), automation of the testing of web applications, higher quality web applications which will reduce end user support costs, an affordable testing environment, and the ability for dispersed testing teams to collaborate over the Web in building and executing complex tests.

4. Who will use SOASTA and how will they find out about it?

SOASTA Concerto will be used by any developer, tester, sales engineer, consultant or business analyst involved in the implementation of Web applications. SOASTA will go to market using a variety of new communications vehicles such as video podcasting, blogging and free trial offers.

5. Where are you now and where do you expect to be a year from now?

The Alpha version of SOASTA Concerto is currently in use at selected companies. SOASTA is continuing to build out the SOASTA Concerto environment and expects a Q1, 2007 launch of the hosted service.

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

Analysts cite the recent boom in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and a general comfort zone enjoyed by IT professionals about security threats as the catalyst for pushing Web services to the top and security to third place for the first time in years.

In fact, until this year, Web services had not even made the top six. Business intelligence nestled into second place among top technologies, followed by security, business process management, customer portals, and systems integrations. The survey of 139 SIM members also revealed an upswing in IT budgets and salaries.

But an increase in budgets and salaries isn’t focused entirely at home. Those IT budgets also reflect and increase in offshore outsourcing. Current budgets allocate 4.2 percent to outsourcing, up from 3.1 percent last year, with increases to 4.8 percent next year.

The increase in virtualization and SOA is clearly reflected in Oracle’s blowout quarter as the company exceeded industry analyst predictions. The boom was so great in Oracle’s business, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was obliged to brag about it at length, at the expense of SAP.

Ellison felt the reason for Oracle’s success was the company’s focus not only on SOA, but also a standards-based middleware approach, especially in ERP. Oracle grew by 80 percent in two quarters.

Many have found the drop in security concern surprising. Martin Ksrek puts in his explanation on his blog:

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Carine Bournez, a technical coordinator on the WS2 project, spoke to GRIDtoday about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). “We evaluated the impact of the project by monitoring European participation in the various W3C working groups we support,” she said. “We measured up to 70 percent European participation in these particular groups – North American participants are usually the majority.”

“These results are impressive,” the GRIDtoday article explained, “precisely because standards development is such an arduous and lengthy process. However WS2 has very effectively spurred communities and companies to action. The project achieved these impressive results by organizing conferences, hosting a seminar and demonstrating example applications.”

The article also offered more specific information about those results. “WS2 has boosted European participation in the Web Services Choreography Description Language working group . . . . It has also boosted participation in the Semantic Web Services Interest Group . . . . And the project’s work has helped to create the Semantic Annotation for Web Services Description Language (SAWSDL) . . .”

Another quote further emphasized the E.U.’s role in this field. “Input from European industry is very important at this point in time,” Bournez said. “European industry is well positioned as an advanced user of the first layers of web service technologies, but has been less of a producer of these first bricks.”

“Participation in the standardization process for recent technologies is critical if we are to take the lead in the web services deployment area,” Bournez concluded.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating how to use the SOAP package from PEAR to query Google’s extensive database. This tutorial assumes that you are using PHP 4 or higher and PEAR::SOAP 0.8.1, and requires basic familiarity with PHP (including a little object-oriented programming).

Note that both Google’s service and PEAR::SOAP are technically still in beta, so you might encounter the odd bug from time to time. There are other SOAP client libraries available, including the PHP5 SOAP extension and NuSOAP, and while implementation details are different the basic theory is the same as presented here.

Setting up the PEAR SOAP module

Before we can start using SOAP, we had better make sure both PEAR itself and the SOAP module are available. The PEAR package manager is installed by default with PHP 4.3.0 and later, but if you are using an earlier version or it is missing on your system check out the PEAR manual for instructions.

Once you have the package manager installed, you will need to download the SOAP package. On most systems, you can just enter pear install SOAP into a console window. At least, that’s the theory. Unless there is a stable release of SOAP available, you will get the message No release with state equal to: ‘stable’ found for ‘SOAP’. Try pear install SOAP-beta to get the most current version of the package at the time of writing, even though it is in beta, or tell PEAR to accept beta versions without complaint by typing pear config-set preferred_state beta.

You may also get one or more messages starting with requires package, followed by Dependencies failed. In this case, try the pear install command again but add the dependencies on the command line. For example, if PEAR complained that the Net_DIME package is missing, try using pear install Net_DIME SOAP instead.

Getting a license key

Once you have installed the SOAP module, the next step is to download the Google Web APIs developers’ kit and register to get a license key. This key allows you to make up to 1000 SOAP queries a day free of charge. Visit Google Web APIs (http://www.google.co.uk/apis/) and follow the instructions on the site.

Unzip the developers’ kit and put it in a convenient place. It only contains samples for accessing the service with .NET and Java, but most of the documentation applies equally to calling Google from PHP.

Decoding the WSDL file

In the developer’s kit main directory you will find a WSDL file called GoogleSearch.wsdl, which you can open in a text editor or XML browser. This file defines exactly what services we can call using SOAP, though the Google documentation is probably easier to read!

However, we can also see what the SOAP module makes of this file. Create a new PHP page and enter the following.

<?php

?>

Place it somewhere on your server along with GoogleSearch.wsdl and access it through your web browser. Assuming everything is working right, you should get a lot of PHP code output. This code is the result of the SOAP_WSDL client class parsing the WSDL file and converting it into PHP functions. This tells us what functions we can call in a rather more readable form than the WSDL document, and is handy particularly if you are using a poorly documented WSDL service.

So how does the code work? Let’s go through it step by step:

1. First, we load the SOAP client file. If this gives an error, it probably means SOAP isn’t installed properly and you should read the instructions above or the PEAR manual.

2. We then create an instance of the SOAP_WSDL class, based on the GoogleSearch.wsdl file. This is one of the main classes we are going to use throughout this tutorial: it parses the WSDL file and represents it as PHP.

3. Finally, we output the proxy code as plain text. (As you can see from the output, in SOAP the proxy is a class that represents the WSDL calls available as PHP functions.)

Spell-checking with Google

If you’ve been using Google for a while (and type as erratically as me), you have probably noticed the “Did you mean…” line that appears if you misspell a word in a search. Thanks to the Google web service, we can add this spelling checker to our PHP applications (though to be honest, it would probably be better to use pspell in an actual application). Enter the following code, with your own license key as the first string.

<?php

?>

Simple, isn’t it? The first line is trivial and the next two are the same as the previous example. The fourth line creates the proxy object based on the code we looked at earlier, so we can make SOAP requests by calling its methods. Finally, we call doSpellingSuggestion and output the result. Access this page in your web browser, and you should see the word ‘dictionary’ on its own.

You might see ‘Object’ instead, in which case SOAP has encountered a problem and returned a SOAP_Fault object. We will look into dealing with these faults sometime in the future, but for now check if you have entered your license key correctly and not managed to exhaust your 1000 query per day limit (!).

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Joeri Cornelissens is the author of this article. For more information about the subject please visit http://www.phphacks.com/

It is a 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) signaling protocol. It is one of the major signaling protocols used in Voice over IP (VoIP).

SIP was developed by IETF MMUSIC Working Group in an initiative to create a more robust standard compared to the H.323, which is a current widely used standard for voice sessions. The need was to cater to the increasing demand put by services such as video conferencing, unified messaging, and voice chatting, which are now being implemented through Internet.

SIP is based on Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It basically deals with embedding call setup and signaling features in networking elements such as user agents and proxy servers. The signaling and call setup can be used by IP-based communication system to support the call processing functions and features present in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). SIP enables a VoIP application to have the same kind of high quality and reliability that traditional telephone systems can deliver. SIP adds quality and reliability to VoIP, which until recently has been associated with the term “low cost alternative”.

SIP handles the signaling part of a communication session. It serves as a carrier for the Session Description Protocol (SDP). SDP handles the media portion of the session. The transmission of voice and video content are done by the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). A SIP session thus involves packet streams of RTP. SIP is a part of the protocols involved in a multimedia session.

The major advantage of SIP is in its support for both IP and conventional telephone communication. Communication service providers can leverage on this protocol to interconnect conventional telephone and IP communication services. This especially sounds good for the vendors of VoIP telephony, wherein both the domains are involved. Owing to SIP’s roots in HTTP, voice based application can also be seamlessly integrated with web services.

SIP is scalable, easy to implement, and requires less setup time than its predecessor protocols. Being text based, it is easy to program. It is a peer-to-peer protocol, requiring no implementation in the network level. The logic is implemented at the communication endpoints, which may be in hardware or software level. Real time sessions are established when and where required. Since SIP can be used to modify any session in progress, a normal telephone call session can be converted into a multi-party videoconference. Users can join in the session no matter what kind of terminal he is using or where he is located. The other person may be logged on to Internet through a PC, or may be traveling with a cell phone.

SIP holds lot of promise in today and tomorrow’s communication world. It has been established as a standard for call control and signaling on 3G cell phone networks by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This means that all multimedia and IP voice call signaling will be done through SIP. New services involving fixed network IP services can thus introduced with ease.

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This article has been published by AccessDirect, a leading service provider of PBX phone systems (hosted/virtual). We also provide voicemail, fax mail, follow me call forwarding, local phone numbers, and toll free numbers. Visit us at www.messagingservice.com.

John K represents AccessDirect, a leading provider of Hosted PBX, voice mail, fax mail, local phone numbers, and toll free numbers.