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

A provider of custom software and consulting services, mhe.net, creates software modules for the financial and technical training industries that can be integrated with third-party solutions to create more robust product offerings.

One such module is mhe.net's SecureCreditServer module the company's first XML Web service application. This application is used to help industrial product leasing companies accelerate credit verification and thus speed up the credit application approval cycle. (Note how it is used to provide better customer service as well as to improve process efficiency by enabling the rapid processing of applications.)

Not only is this SecureCreditServer module able to help mhe.net customers increase efficiency, it also helps fill in one of the "gotchas" identified earlier in this book by augmenting the security of XML-based transactions (mhe.net's software uses its own security encryption library to help make transactions secure; also it can take advantage of Microsoft's .NET extensive cryptographic library to further extend security features of its product).

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Using Fewer and Less-skilled Programmers to Reduce Costs and Time-to-Market

Although mhe.net's Secure Credit product helps improve customer service and increase organizational efficiency by streamlining the credit checking process as well as helps fill in the security gap that exists today in Web services architecture the effect that Web services (in the form of Microsoft's .NET framework) is having on mhe.net's application development capability is even more impressive. According to Michael Hoenig, President of mhe.net: "We have a unique perspective in this area [the building of Web services applications] since we released our first Web service in Q2, 2000 and have the scars to prove how difficult it is to build a Web service pre-.NET . . . the act of exposing a Visual Basic .NET function as a SOAP compliant Web service is [now] trivial."

When asked how this new ease of development affected mhe.net's application development costs, Mr. Hoenig responded: "I use fewer developers to build an application and they don't have to be rocket scientists, either. When you get to a point of relying on the libraries [application modules], development is more of a mechanical process. Sure, everyone wants something different and you can't build cookie cutters 100% of the time, but if you can box in 90% of the build to implementations of existing code, clients are going to love you."

Source: .NET Press Kit from PDC Conference, Microsoft Corporation. Used by Permission.

In this example, mhe.net shows that applications are no longer complex to develop (using the combination of Web services and Microsoft's .NET framework). The company also implies that it no longer needs as many developers with experience in building the infrastructure and plumbing to make distributed applications work. Instead, developers are now used to link libraries of applications modules together to meet client needs rather than dealing with the communications and networking and program-to-program API complexities inherent in pre-Web-services days. By bypassing these complexities, mhe.net can reduce development time and cost. And using less expensive library-linking developers rather than more costly infrastructure-experienced developers also helps reduce development costs and helps the company focus on what it does best: building modules and customizing them to meet specialized customer requirements.

Not So Fast…

In the pre-.NET days, mhe.net had developed SecureCreditServer using XML-RPC as the transport over HTTP. The latest version built on .NET uses SOAP protocols to bind communications sessions, WSDL protocols, and XML to pass information all over HTTP. In the case of SecureCreditServer, UDDI is not being used to make the general public aware of mhe.net's security services application, because far-reaching UDDI repositories are not yet in place or in widespread use.