How Web Services Can Be Used to Reduce Development Time and Costs

This example a hypothetical banking environment illustrates how Web services can be used to reduce programming time and costs, thus enabling the bank to bring new banking products to market more quickly.

A bank may have a core application that provides its customers with information on their savings and checking accounts. But the bank may also wish to provide loan, mortgage, life insurance, or other additional services to its customers in order to increase its revenue stream. The traditional way of adding these services has been either to build custom applications that offer such services or to locate packaged applications and then manually integrate those applications with the bank's core application. In applications developer's terms, the new applications would be "bolted on" to the existing application.

By using Web services standards the new applications that the bank wishes to add can be found on the Web and easily integrated into the bank's existing application portfolio, thus reducing the time to develop custom applications and the related costs for development and integration work. By using XML as the basic content format and making use of Web services standards such as UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP, the bank can quickly find new applications (services) and integrate them in a dynamic and fluid fashion with its existing application portfolio (see Figure 5-3).

Figure 5-3. Hypothetical Banking Use of Web Services.

Note in Figure 5-3 that the bank used Web services to find, build, test, integrate, and deploy Web-based application services. Essentially the bank was able to reach out over the Web, find application modules that could satisfy its needs, and rapidly integrate those products within the existing bank infrastructure. In this case, the bank didn't have to worry about what platform, operating system, or programming language was used by the Web services application module it all just worked, because the bank and the service module provider made use of the same format (XML) and the same Web services standards (UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP).

This example illustrates how time-to-develop and time-to-market can be reduced using Web services standards to find and bind new applications into the bank's existing portfolio.

Also worthy of note is that Web services focus largely on processes and less on programming. Application developers and programmers will be able to publish their applications location and specifications using UDDI and WSDL, and then the real magic happens when business-level people and consumers start to string together webs of services that they need in order to accomplish their respective goals. In other words, Web services enables less technical people to link together various services, creating a whole new application-development approach to business and consumer problem solving. In the case of Web services, the solutions that people string together are what deliver value the actual programming is the means to the end.

Also, observe that the people who are linking various applications together to deliver business or consumer value are often nontechnical (and this is significant in terms of the cost to develop applications). Using less technically skilled individuals to create value chains of Web services applications represents an opportunity to save huge sums of money within enterprises.

Not So Fast…

Again, we must acknowledge that finding new Web-enabled applications on the Web is somewhat difficult today, owing to the lack of an expansive UDDI directory service. However, after programmers hard-code the links to the desired new Web-based applications (or after users make manual choices in order to find and use the Web services that they desire), the rest of this banking application is entirely "do-able" using today's state-of-the-art Web services standards.