Neil O'Toole

Web services products have matured rapidly over the past 12 months, to the point where it's become acceptable to utilize the technology in major projects. However, though improving, the currently available toolkits can't be considered complete. This article surveys the rapidly evolving development tools landscape and addresses what tools a fully featured environment should provide to the Web-services developer. IDE Integration Historically, developers have toiled with an array of utilities, editors, and command-line tools. The ability to effectively navigate this maze of programs is a source of pride to many of them; however, this maze introduces a steep learning curve and, in the long run, lowers productivity. Some of the costs associated with such a nonintegrated approach are time lost switching back and forth between programs, time required to learn a new user int... (more)