When Will My Organization Need to Be Ready to Deploy Web Services?

When will Web services standards and extensions be mature enough to be used in real-world production environments?" Research reported in this book shows that some Web services applications are ready today to be deployed in certain types of application environments (message-based with low security and low transaction-rate requirements). To expand the reach of Web services in the marketplace, new standards will have to evolve around security, reliable messaging, routing, transaction-handling, performance tuning, and more. Most of these issues are being dealt with accordingly by standards committees. Meanwhile, vendors, the open-source community, and consortia are stepping forward with their own programs to fill the gap.

The accompanying Gartner Group chart (Figure 0-4) illustrates this analyst firm's view of the emergence of Web services over the next several years.

Figure 0-4. When Will Your Organization Need to Adopt Web Services?

Source: "Web Services: Software as Service Comes Alive," Daryl Plummer, October 2001. Used by Permission.

Note how the Gartner prognostication emphasizes the important role of UDDI registries in helping drive the acceptance of Web services. This theme will be echoed often in this book. In many cases UDDI is not used because a large public UDDI directory does not yet exist. Until formal, public UDDI registries come into being, Web services will fall short of its true commercial potential.

On the personal computing side, personal Web services applications are just starting to come to market. While businesses will need to wait at least two years to exploit UDDI registries, personal Web services applications are ready to go and are coming to market today.