IBM Web Services Navigator
An Eclipse/RAD plug-in for interactive visualization of Web service transactions.
Date Posted: December 2, 2004
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Update: April 24, 2006
Version 3.0.3: Additions and enhancements to the following views: Navigator, Transaction Flows, Flow Patterns, and Message Content. New Statistics Tables view added.
What is IBM Web Services Navigator?
IBM Web Services Navigator is an Eclipse/RAD (Rational® Application Developer) plug-in for interactive visualization of Web service transactions.
IBM Web Services Navigator addresses the complexity of understanding and debugging complex collections of Web services, such as those found in Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, by visualizing the actual execution of Web service transactions. The plug-in visualizes logs of Web service activity from IBM WebSphere Application Servers collected by a Web service data collector, a companion technology to be released separately.
How does it work? IBM Web Services Navigator allows users to observe and explore the dynamic behavior of their Web service applications through a new perspective with five new interactive views of messages and transactions:
- The Services Topology view highlights the services that participated in the transactions and summarizes the messages they exchanged.
- The Transaction Flows view diagrams the flow of messages from service to service for each transaction.
- The Flow Patterns view exposes repeated patterns of service interactions between transactions, as well as repeated patterns of invocations within transactions.
- The Message Contents view reveals the actual contents of individual messages and tracks selected data values through transactions.
- The Statistics Tables view shows execution performance information numerically.
This package consists of a plug-in for Eclipse 3 or Rational Application Developer 6, as well as a collection of sample logs. The plug-in includes online documentation.
The Data Collector for IBM Web Services Navigator is another alphaWorks technology. These two technologies complement each other to make a true technology preview.
For further information about IBM Web Services Navigator, please see the following papers:
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| | About the technology author(s):
All the contributors to this technology work at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
Matthew Arnold, Ph.D., is a research staff member. His thesis work focused on profiling and optimization techniques for the Java programming language, and his current research interests include software profiling, program understanding, and dynamic optimization.
Wim De Pauw, Ph.D., is is a research staff member and the technical lead for the IBM Web Services Navigator project. His research interests include software visualization, Web services, service-oriented architecture, pattern extraction, profiling, and debugging. Dr. De Pauw's previous project, Jinsight, was a Java visualization tool and also appeared on alphaWorks.
Michelle Lei, a software engineer, holds a master's degree. Her interest areas inlude graph layout algorithms, Web technologies, and middleware. She currently works as project manager for Java development at the Office Fédéral d'Informatique et Télécommunication in Geneva.
John Morar, Ph.D., has extensive experience in semiconductors and computer virus research. He has written 70 articles in reviewed scientific journals and holds patents in the areas of device processing, computer virus detection, Web services, and economic systems. Dr. Morar currently manages a research group focusing on the use of Web services both within and between enterprises.
Edward Pring, a senior programmer, holds an M.S. His research interests include Web services, performance optimization, and test automation.
Lionel Villard, Ph.D., is an advisory research engineer. Dr. Villard's research interests include multimedia documents, contextual adaptation, authoring tools, document transformations, incremental transformations, and high performance.
Sophia Krasikov, an advisory research engineer, holds a master's degree in applied math and computer science. Her areas of interest include collaborative web services optimization, monitoring and control, and visualization software. |
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