Webbed Services and the Webbed Ecosystem

In this book, I use the term webbed services to describe the set of business services that are based on a component approach to systems design. This design is driven from the Web and its associated technologies, regardless of the specific technologies used. Because webbed services are constructed from a set of interconnected software components and services that can be reused in multiple places, they can usually avoid some of the expense, time, and effort associated with building and modifying monolithic applications.

Webbed services is a very inclusive term; it's increasingly difficult to find services that are not somehow tied into the Web. As a case in point, I was recently speaking about webbed services at a large retail organization, and someone in the group stated that their main application did not fit into the webbed category because it was a stand-alone Oracle Financials application. However, further discussion soon revealed that their international operations used real-time currency conversion decisions. The real-time exchange rates in the Oracle Financials application were, in fact, accessed through the Web.

Indeed, webbed services are now taking on many of the characteristics of an ecosystem, which is a group of independent but interrelated elements comprising a unified whole. A smooth business process depends on each element carrying out its tasks accurately and quickly, with consideration for maintaining balances among all the elements. In a well-balanced webbed ecosystem, all elements bear appropriate shares of the load. None is overwhelmed, none is underutilized. Balance is concurrently maintained between service quality and service cost. The ecosystem metaphor is gaining momentum as online processes evolve to dynamically select their elements (underlying services) based on their current behavior and performance.

The webbed ecosystem perspective also holds within any subgroup of systems. For instance, hosting facilities use a range of technologies, such as prioritizing devices, bandwidth managers, global load balancers, and caches, to deliver online business services. These systems also need balanced management; adding bandwidth when servers are congested is a wasteful investment.