Web Services Now and When

One of the most significant changes in the software industry has been the arrival of Web services , a truly distributed computing model in which applications “talk” to one another.

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

Page 2 of 2: Web Services Overview

Who’s Doing Web Services?

You’d be surprised how widespread they are already, even while pilot programs are only getting underway among businesses to test how well
the agents navigate security and messaging issues.

Perhaps the best example of the growth of Web services is eBay. The
online auction king has been aggressively developing its Web services
platform by extending application programming interfaces that
essentially turn its Web site into a platform.

Take Tim O’Reilly’s take in a
White Paper published in June for eBay’s developer section:

“We’re moving from a world in which the software that most people
interact with is desktop software residing on a personal computer into one
in which software is running as a set of services provided over the
Internet.”

The auction site’s developer
section gives soup-to-nuts information about deploying its eBay API.
“With the eBay API, you communicate directly with the eBay database in XML
format. By using the API, your application can provide a custom interface,
functionality and specialized operations not otherwise afforded by the eBay
interface.” Since 1999, eBay has offered APIs and now offers more than 100
Web services calls available to developers to build applications that can connect to those services. They include pricing information, buy-it-now features, and payment options through its PayPal subsidiary.

The growth and use of APIs across the Web illustrate how rapidly Web
services are spreading, even as technical issues such as security and authentication are worked out by standards bodies.

Online retailing giant Amazon.com is another example. Companies such as
Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have been helping developers build and deploy Web Services and clients for close to four years now. Sun’s J2EE platform, for
example, is where developers build on the building blocks in order to access
Amazon.com’s selling platform.

As for Microsoft, its .NET framework was launched in 2000
with the next generation of Web services in mind. The 2.0 version of the
.NET platform, currently in beta, aims to make building Web services applications even easier.
It also complies with the SOAP 1.2 messaging protocol as well as a basic security profile spec for Web services in the latest release.

As internenetnews.com has reported, when outsiders build onto eBay’s or Amazon.com’s platform — either via
the .NET or J2EE platforms, they often do it in surprising ways that the
mother company wouldn’t have considered. This point helps distill the essence of Web services — and why it is fundamentally changing the Web.

For example, when Amazon.com
exposed data from its Alexa Web services beta program, it kicked off a wave
of creativity as it provided aggregated, close-to-real-time information
about Web traffic, including the top sites visited and where visitors to one
site go next.

“By offering Web services, we let a thousand flowers bloom,” Jeff Bezos
said during October’s Web 2.0 conference. “With APIs, we can let the
ecosystem develop and get innovative about things we ourselves may never have
thought of or gotten to.”

Future Forward

These two examples notwithstanding, some research firms believe Web services will be operational on a wide scale basis in five years. But along the way, several things are happening as the market continues to evolve.

One obvious point on the enterprise side is that the market has too many
small, niche vendors to bear. This is leading larger vendors looking to add
new technology to scoop up the smaller fry and get a competitive edge.

Over the Past year, Computer Associates has acquired
Adjoin and Netegrity, HP has purchased
Talking Blocks, Actional merged with Westbridge Technologies and Digital Evolution has snapped
up Flamenco Networks.

Another point is this: While it’s great that software vendors build
technologies and usher standards into being, these things are worth little
unless companies can find ways to tie these technologies to business
processes. In the enterprise world, this is why vendors are turning to business process management (BPM) with their Web services strategies.

BPM ties
applies business processes to Web services, helping loosely-coupled
applications conduct transactions.

For example, it is unlikely the widget scenario would be possible without it
because too many things can go wrong in a distributed computing environment
unless services are properly corralled.

To support BPM, standards body OASIS is hashing out the Business Process Execution Language , a language for specifying business process behavior based on
Web services.

Together, Web services and BPM are key components of service-oriented
architectures (SOA), a broader set of distributed computing characteristics
in which software resources are rendered available as services on a network.

Companies such as IBM and BEA are posing SOAs as schemas in which software code is generally recycled or reused for other programming purposes. The idea is that programmers save time and the company money by not having to manually write new code.

While that is one compelling facet of SOAs, research firm ZapThink said the
concept of “service orientation” is gaining steam, providing business users
with services they can call upon and compose into business processes.

While many research firms are conservative about projected growth for young
architectures, ZapThink believes the market for service orientation will
grow exponentially.

Plenty of security issues need to be worked out too. After all, if your intelligent agent is programmed to go out and find the best priced widgets, eventually carrying credit card information or other sensitive data needed to complete the transaction in a Web services protocol, shouldn’t it know who it’s eventually dealing with?

The question may help explain why many businesses and enterprises are first testing Web services applications internally, such as between different company divisions before exposing them to business or trading partners.

Training is another issue. Adapting legacy databases, no matter how fine-tuned with middleware they are, takes time, as does training developers and programmers to think of a more universal approach to modeling databases. These are just two in a laundry list of issues that have already slowed some projects. But testing leads to more trouble-shooting, which eventually begets Web services that work more smoothly.

Research firm ZapThink estimates the market for service orientation alone will
grow exponentially, with the total SOA Implementation Framework market going
from $4.4 billion in 2005 to $43 billion by 2010.

The numbers may help explain why businesses large and small are making sure they are aware of the shift to Web services and how those fundamental changes will impact their way of conducting business.

Susan Kuchinskas and Sean Michael Kerner contributed to this story