Chapter Summary

Web services represent a new, standards-based way of creating application programs that can work cooperatively with other application programs, regardless of the platform or program languages used between the two. By enabling this loosely coupled approach to cross-platform, program-to-program communications, Web services are expected to change the way that various enterprises will compete in the future. (Among many other benefits, Web services will help lower development costs and improve market/competitive response times.) Hence it is extremely important that business executives and strategists gain a basic understanding of what Web services are and how they work. (Failure to do so will leave the enterprises of some executives vulnerable to attack by more nimble competitors and may also result in inefficiencies in application development and in business process flow.)

The benefits of building Web services are many. The biggest payback centers on development-cost reduction and rapid response to changing market or competitive situations. But other benefits also hold great potential for adopters of Web services, such as being able to use existing intellectual property to create new revenue opportunities (e.g., applications that have already been written for internal use can be made available on a charge basis). Nine distinct benefits that can be derived using Web services were described in this chapter.

Web services are still evolving and have some "maturity" issues (gotchas) to deal with. The good news is that the foundation for Web services application design and deployment is in place thanks to the standardization of XML for data/document presentation/manipulation; UDDI registries; and WSDL templates, SOAP APIs, and HTTP protocols. The current shortcomings in security, manageability, reliability, routing, and transaction handling can be dealt with using third-party software designed to supplement the existing Web services protocols.

Early adopters have other options for building a Web services-oriented architecture. Other approaches to distributed computing, such as CORBA and EDI, can be used to send and receive XML and other data in a secure and reliable manner. Many early adopters are using these other approaches for passing XML data in the short term, but they are planning to use Web services standard protocols such as SOAP and WSDL over time to replace architectures such as CORBA and EDI that are more complex and difficult to program.

When should your organization be prepared to adopt Web services? A strong argument can be made that Web services can be used successfully today in certain application processing environments (in which the key aspect is message passing or data sharing). But Web services are probably not, at this juncture, appropriate for highly transactional environments where secure and reliable communications are required, unless augmented with third-party hardware or software.

Also be aware that one of the key elements of Web services is a registry service called UDDI and public UDDI directories/registries will not mature for a few years. Without them, cooperative applications will have trouble finding each other, thus preventing Web services from living up to their full potential. Research conducted by the Gartner Group combined with research conducted by this author suggests that mature UDDI directories are still several years off. This means that your organization has a few years to build prototypes using SOAP and WSDL (while allowing public UDDI registries to develop).

There are three approaches to deploying Web services: (1) partner with an application server vendor; (2) do it yourself using tools and utilities provided by various vendors or standards organizations; and (3) find a professional services partner who can implement Web services for you. This book takes a close look at product and services offerings from various vendors that fit into each of these categories.

As you evaluate Web services vendors, realize that competition will be based on three factors: (1) the depth of the Web services offering (as in: does it implement the Web services protocols and services correctly?); (2) the breadth of additional products that help developers design, build, deploy, and manage Web services offerings; and (sometimes) (3) the availability of professional services. These are the considerations that business executives should weigh when determining which vendor's products to utilize and when developing Web services-based business and technology strategies.