Summary

In this chapter, we took a brief look at two different Web services technologies. The first one allows developers to quickly build portals by consuming Web services. Recognizing that the standard data-centric programmatic interface of Web services does not facilitate building portals that may potentially consist of a wide variety of portlets, WSRP specification defines a higher-level interactive interface to Web services. Interactive interfaces do not expose fine-grained service-specific operations, but instead expose the user interface (markup) of the Web service through a set of coarse-grained generic operations. The portal developer does not need in-depth domain knowledge for each consumed Web service. A portal can consume any WSRP-compliant service by using these same operations across all of the Web services.

The second technology addresses the need for an architectural layer for the monitoring and management of Web services. Typical systems management software helps to answer questions such as whether a piece of software or a system is up or down. The systems that are monitored and managed are larger, and the information that is gathered is at a more coarse granularity. The advent of Web services places different and additional requirements for monitoring and management systems. The sheer number of Web services and the enormous transaction volume they will create differentiates Web services management systems from traditional systems management environments. Moreover, Web services will be implemented on heterogeneous platforms and many will be located outside of the enterprise firewall. Given the new and additional requirements placed on management systems by Web services, the WSDM specification is trying to define a set of industry-wide management and monitoring modules. This will provide a standard and well-understood means of offering security, access control, accounting, monitoring and logging, performance and quality of service, as well as brokering across multiple Web services and across multiple organizations.