Three Approaches

Anecdotal examples in this book describe the best approaches used by various enterprises to implement Web services today. This book also identifies three approaches that facilitate the building and deployment of Web services-based applications. To get started on building a Web services application environment your options are to:

1. Use an application-server approach. (An application server is a turnkey environment that has tools and utilities for building Web services applications usually optimized for a particular underlying systems/operating system platform.) Application servers can be all-inclusive (hardware, software, and services) or they can be software platforms that can run on a particular hardware platform or across multiple different platform types.

2. Find a la carte tools and utilities or open-source software and then glue various components together in order to create Web services. (This involves far more integration work by the IT department than the previous approach but can be significantly less costly than purchasing an entire application server environment).

3. Employ a professional services firm to assist with Web services application development and/or with training an existing staff on how to build Web services applications.