The setup
Arsenal Technology started right after CitySearch. I co-founded it with Dan Wascovich, who worked out of our Santa Clara office. Arsenal was the consulting company umbrella. Its first product was acareer.com, and Axis was the product that came next. Consulting income, mostly the SGI contract, funded the startup work.
What I built
Axis stood for Autonomous XML Interchange Server. The problem it went after was getting data out of other websites and sharing it across sites and between applications. The existing approaches were painful: COM, COM+ and DCOM on the Windows side, CORBA on the Java side. Axis aimed to give web applications a more standardized way to exchange data without going through those heavyweight middleware stacks.
Axis specified how two systems could exchange data over plain web protocols, HTTP and HTTPS, using XML documents and web-server verbs for data passing, with configuration to connect the two. The aim was to supplant EDI and other closed, expensive models. That put us up against the Value Added Networks of the day, the VANs, which charged large fees to redistribute data such as parts catalogs.
We designed a layer where you could build a datasource-to-Axis translator in a UI, including scanning a database’s table structure, and we built working tech demos.
Net result
We pitched Axis to venture firms without success. It had no customers or pilots and stayed at working tech demos. I moved to Corrigo, and about three months later Axis and Arsenal were wound down. Arsenal ended with a standard C corp shutdown, not a formal bankruptcy, and was deregistered with the IRS.
The idea anticipated what would later become web services, SOAP and REST.
Key people
- Dan Wascovich, co-founder.
Technologies used
XML documents over HTTP and HTTPS with web-server verbs, a UI for building datasource-to-Axis translators with database table scanning, set against the COM, COM+, DCOM and CORBA middleware of the day.