Fitting Web Services into the Portal

Web services and portals can fit together like hand and glove. After all, both web services and a portal have a fundamental goal of systems integration. They both allow users to connect to disparate data sources, yet hide complexities of this connection such as protocol and syntax.

Web services can be vital as a means of content syndication, which means the repackaging of content that is created or managed elsewhere. Portals are often made up of components that extract information from many different sources. These information sources can be on the same machine, within the local area network, within a wide area network, or (thanks to web services) on the other side of the planet! Web services allow developers to create programmatic interfaces for any type of information and then expose these interfaces over the Internet. Portal developers can then consume these web services within a portal without having to establish direct contact with the data source itself. For instance, you might want to establish subscriptions to news services, yet make the news articles conform to your web site's look and feel.

Another promising use of web services in a portal is to provide support for transactions. Through web services, you can connect to an e-commerce system for order entry or inventory management. For instance, you could requisition office supplies by filling in a form, then route the transactions to a supplier for fulfillment. A similar example is travel and lodging services. You could link your portal to Expedia or another travel site and get flights and hotel rooms as you are planning a meeting.