Debugging Just Ain’t What It Used To Be for SOA Developers
March 5th, 2008 by Alex Neihaus
This week has been a big week for us. Monday, we launched our new web site. And yesterday, we shipped ActiveVOS 5.0, a major new release for us.
As a result, we’ve been getting lots of attention (including some from competitors who suddenly find themselves behind in the race to deliver advanced functionality at the astonishing new price points we have announced). But of all the early comment and discussion we have seen, the most satisfying to me personally is this blog post by Todd Biske.
Todd took special note of the part of our ActiveVOS 5.0 announcement in which we describe our advanced scenario testing and remote debugging. Todd writes, in part:
…I lamented the fact that when a new development paradigm comes along…we run the risk of taking one or more steps backward… I used …test-driven development as an example. As a result, I’m very happy to see a vendor in this space emphasizing this capability in their product..
Many years ago, I developed commercial applications for a hospital. I used to love writing the code. But I hated debugging it. In those days, debugging tools weren’t visual, weren’t integrated and weren’t very helpful. While it wasn’t as manual as sitting at the machine console with the machine language registers in a run book, like the poor bastard above, it was pretty damn close.
Then the PC revolution made integrated testing and debugging a fundamental part of most IDEs, a very good thing. (And I moved out of writing code to marketing packaged software, also a very good thing for users.)
But what of SOA and testing apps? What about an environment in which messages are flying all over the place? What does a developer need for a testing environment when the service he or she is communicating with is, literally, a software black box? It’s a problem that our 1950’s dude would find insurmountable. You can’t test services-based applications with the tools of the past. It’s a mega problem.
And ActiveVOS has licked it. Believe it or not, it was the scenario testing and remote debugging capabilities I saw in an early demo that cemented my decision to joint Active Endpoints. I knew, as Todd does, that while testing is not something that may grip you in a web demo, good debugging makes working in ActiveVOS a pleasure for SOA developers. (Our web demo, BTW, emphasizes these breakthrough capabilities, so look out for them in the demo.)
So, thank you, Todd, for looking beyond the front-of-screen UI candy to where it really counts and for knowing that eye-candy may be great in a demo, but it’s the parts of a system developers actually use everyday to manage applications that makes all the difference in the long term.
Tags: remote debugging, scenario testing, SOA, testing
