Web Services Now and When
One of the most significant changes in the software industry has been the arrival of Web services In short, it's the next evolution of the Web. And for many developers, the future has arrived. In this latest installment of In Focus, in which internetnews.com provides readers with an executive summary of key technology trends, an overview of Web services.
"The first phase of the Web was about populating small pieces in the form of individual pages," as Joe Kraus, a co-founder of defunct search portal
Excite, said at the recent Web 2.0 conference. "Phase two is about joining these individual pieces together."
Application-to-application communication can enable such tasks as
allowing one application to tell another application on a network that a business needs to reload on its inventory.
Take a Web services scenario involving widgets. Imagine a business
application sitting on a network in a widget distribution supply chain.
The app "notices" that inventory is low in London. It could conceivably
fire off a query to the applications of other distributors within the supply
chain to determine if there are enough widgets to replenish the London
warehouse.
An application in New York might respond in the affirmative, to which the
London-based application might order and automatically pay for -- 1,000
widgets. Once the payment has been verified, the New York-based application
would then scurry across the network, making sure the order is filled. The agents on both sides of the service provided and consumed have fulfilled their jobs thanks to Web services frameworks.
That is a classic example of how Web services might work to improve the productivity of the modern business world. It's hard to describe such a transaction without personifying the software performing the operations.
That's the whole point. Web services could subsume many of the daily
responsibilities of humans, freeing them up to perform other tasks.
To be fair, picking up the phone to receive an order from a partner around
the globe might not seem like a big deal. But take that one example and
multiply it by millions to assume the daily glut of business transactions to
help explain why Web services are increasing human productivity to an
unfathomable degree.
Sounds like a technological windfall? To be sure, companies are investing
heavily enough in Web services that IDC believes the market will be worth
more than $3.2 billion by 2008.
The Building Blocks
A number of pieces must fall into place before the Web services jigsaw is
complete. In order to drive widespread adoption among business customers,
high-tech vendors must sell them on the idea that the technology is secure,
reliable, manageable and interoperable, or capable of working with disparate
products in the same network.
Web services start with a base with distinct technology pillars:
Building on the Blocks
Building blocks alone are not enough. Vendors, working under the aegis of
standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and OASIS, are
developing standards to ensure that Web services work together independent
of vendor.
While the work pace of standards groups may seem glacial to customers,
technical committees realize how important it is to get things right. In the
process, they avoid overlap, confusion or infringement on the technologies
of other parties.
This takes time. But as any expert on software will tell you, a schema like
Web
Services Security (WS-Security) is vital to the further development and
adoption of all Web services standards, laying a foundation for secure
messaging. After all, when a company's agent goes out to search for supplies
(and another application to communicate with), it has to be sure it knows who
it's about to hand over critical data to, such as credit card information.
Analysts generally believe that when vendors that helped pioneer many Web
services protocols, such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, commit to a
standard and it finds acceptance within the W3C or OASIS, it is locked in.
When the 20 or more standards are trimmed down, modified and passed, the
software community will have a complete stack from which to program and
build new services.
Next Page: Examples, please