Steam XML™ provides a development environment and runtime engine that greatly simplifies the design and rapid prototyping of XML and Web services. It eliminates the need for the myriad of tools and languages including XSLT, DOM, JSP, EJB, CSS that are normally required to create Web services. Steam XML is easy to learn and significantly reduces the volume of code required for Web services. The software combines advanced object-oriented facilities with native XML data structures and HTML-like presentation.

The Steam XML IDE is an interactive development environment that includes a set of tools for the Steam platform. It provides an easy means for writing, running, and debugging Water programs. The Steam IDE expression stepper offers much greater programmer guidance than the typical line-by-line steppers of other IDEs. Because it understands XML and HTML it is able to spot incorrectly-formed expressions. The Steam IDE also provides a customizable menu for inserting common patterns, a one-click test case generator, integrated documentation tools, a powerful object inspector, and an online reference manual. The resulting high productivity environment caters to the Extreme Programming style with its rapid edit, run, and debug cycles.