Being unveiled on Monday, the Mindreef Coral platform enables collaboration among developers, architects, testers, and support people building Web services. Coral Server technology is key to the platform, with role-based servers acting as hubs housing Web service data and XML-aware tools for governing, testing, and supporting Web services.

"Each Web services team would typically have a Coral server, and as teams work with other teams to build large distributed systems like SOA, they would [use] the collaborative tools to collaborate across platform boundaries, to do the different functions in governance, testing, diagnostics, and so forth," said Jim Moskun, chief strategy officer at Mindreef.

Tools are provided for governance, which is the codifying of organizational policies and rules; multi-role testing; diagnostics and lifecycle support. Through Mindreef's shared workspace technology, users can share data such as WSDL files, SOAP messages, playable script, and simulation and descriptive data. Mindreef Coral also offers a community portal for data sharing.

With Coral, Mindreef is capitalizing on a need for teams to work together in building an SOA, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "I think that Mindreef smartly with its Coral Server has identified the need for developers to be able to synchronize in their processes, because SOA is going to have to involve many more people working in some sort of cohesion than has been the case with previous development that was quite isolated or in silos," Gardner said.

Mindreef Coral is available for purchase on a concurrent user license basis, with pricing starting at US$999 for a base Coral Server that runs on Windows platforms.