Life Before Web Services

Did life exist before web services? Undoubtedly so. Even today, most portals deny themselves the benefits of web services. In the pre “web services architecture, the lack of a standard communications infrastructure was a major hurdle for data exchange within as well as between organizations. Organizations used a number of different hardware and software solutions, there was no common protocol or data format, and there were many proprietary data stores. Although electronic interactions between companies were cumbersome to create and maintain, they have existed for quite some time in various forms. The Internet, and the many technologies that have been developed for the Internet medium, have slowly helped businesses find new ways to cooperate electronically .

Over the last few years some trends in communication have clearly emerged within and between organizations. These trends include business-to-business integration (B2Bi), virtual value chain, software as a service, system integration within the distributed enterprise, and more. All these trends point toward standards for integrating systems across organizational boundaries. And they all represent ways for businesses (or departments within an enterprise) to work together to create more efficient ways of doing business. The data format for such interchanges has been standardized as extensible markup language (XML). While the XML standard has made data exchange easier, something more is needed to enable compatibility among programs ”web services.

In the past, the mere thought of integrating disparate systems was frightening. An interface for communication between two platforms was not always available. With no common network mechanism, no common character codes, and therefore no common ways to send data back and forth between disparate systems, integrating these systems seemed like a nightmarish task. Fortunately, with the advent of XML and web services, system administrators no longer dread integrating disparate systems.