How Web Services Improve Individual Productivity

All of the previous generic examples focused on how Web services could be applied to businesses to improve productivity (through better business process flow), reduce costs (by easier, more efficient programming), and react to changing market/competitive conditions and other business-focused scenarios. But Web services can be built to serve the needs of individuals as well as businesses.

Imagine a scenario where you are willing to receive messages at any time or in any place from only a few select individuals. For instance, you may wish to allow such transmissions from your wife or husband, your mom, or selected business partners or associates. Currently, you can wear a pager a dedicated device that allows you to receive messages. But those messages can be from anyone, not only from your selected people. Plus, pagers don't work in some locations for instance, 30,000 feet up when you're in a plane. And you may not own a pager.

Along come "personalizable" Web services applications application programs that can be instructed to deliver messages from people or programs that you have indicated to any Internet-enabled device you designate. The basic concept is that you have access to a Web service program that acts as your personal assistant or personal valet. This program can be made aware of your preferences and can deliver specified types of information to whatever Internet-enabled device you choose. In the aforementioned scenario, you may have instructed your personal Web services program to deliver messages from a select group of people to you via e-mail only between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 1 p.m. (because you expect to be on a flight between those hours and you plan to be using the Internet and your e-mail system on the plane). Or you may have instructed a stock program to notify you of a particular change in your portfolio. In each case your personal Web service can be instructed to carry out your desires.

Notice in this example that a UDDI registry was not necessary in order to provide these services. Further, the role of WSDL in negotiating the service was minimal the applications were simply taking messages delivered to one source and determining whether they should be sent to another source. The important point is that Web services enable you to create a personalized programmable "valet" that can make decisions for you based upon preferences that you have previously established. And this valet has the potential to reduce the time that you spend managing your computer applications and messaging systems, freeing you up to do more productive tasks.

Not So Fast…

There is not much to critique about the foregoing scenario. UDDI's role was minimal, as was that of WSDL. These types of personalized applications are simple and they can be proven to work today.

The primary concerns are with external infrastructure. (For instance, how do you secure message transfer if you designate messages be sent to a wireless device, or how do you efficiently send a complex multimedia message in such a scenario?) To make Web services ubiquitous, issues such as security, wireless data transfer, multimedia presentation, routing, and numerous details of infrastructure-related technology will need to be resolved. The good news is that the W3C standards organization is already aggressively working on resolving all of these and more.