Best-practices enforcement, content-based routing highlighted Confluent Software and Compuware are boosting Web services management and Windows driver development, respectively.Confluent on Monday will ship Confluent Web Services Management Platform 3.5, featuring best-practices enforcement, content-based routing, and life cycle management.The new version enables decentralized IT organizations to develop enterprise-wide security and quality-of-service best practices for Web services, even if the services were used by different departments and deployed on multiple software platforms and messaging protocols, Confluent said. Content-based routing in the product enables inspection of message content and re-routing based on rules and policies. Life cycle management gives IT staff the ability to move Confluent runtime enforcement components from development and testing to production.Additionally, business policies for Web services can be deployed without coding. This enables security and operational policies of Web services to co-exist with departmental policies. For example, IT staff can define security policies that are enforced throughout the enterprise while individual departments can build operational policies for specific Web services, the company said.XML standards and Java Message Service are supported in the product, according to Confluent. A follow-up version of Confluent’s platform, due to ship later this quarter, will feature agent-based support for Tibco and C++ environments. The Tibco agent will enable policy management in Tibco’s BusinessWorks platform for XML Web services execution, said Edward Zou, general manager for business integration at Tibco.Compuware this week released DriverStudio 3.1, for developing drivers for the Windows platform.The new version, which works in conjunction with the Microsoft Driver Development Kit (DDK), boosts debugging support for AMD’s 64-bit Opteron and Athlon chip platforms and also can function with Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. The $2,499 product makes it easier to develop drivers, as opposed to simply relying on Microsoft’s kit, according to Compuware.“DriverStudio requires use of the DDK, but it speeds up development by giving you tools that help you create drivers, debug them, test them, and tune them,” said John Carpenter, DriverStudio product manager. Software Development