Why Develop Web Services?

Apart from being a cool technology, Web services solve a number of business problems (or at least help technologists solve and simplify complex business problems). For instance, consider a large (or even small-to-medium) enterprise, where a number of technologies and frameworks (operating systems, programming languages, component models, databases) exist today. A number of these corporations have tried hard, with little success, to develop application development and integration technology standards, but the reality is still that departmental solutions (either a particular business unit or even a different group such as Research and Development) either choose to evaluate and implement cutting-edge technologies or shy away from using anything but the technology platform that they have confidence in. Take the case of a company in which a number of departmental applications have been developed using Microsoft ASP/COM frameworks; one group may utilize one of the J2EE application server environments, whereas another group may have developed its own proprietary application framework over the years .

There is a need to standardize architectures and frameworks across an organization, and a number of organizations are headed in that direction, but getting completely there is a challenging and in some ways an impossible task. What is needed is a mechanism whereby a number of systems, both internal and external, can be integrated in a loosely coupled fashion regardless of the technology they have been constructed in.

Accessing applications must be as simple as accessing a Web site. The Web site requires a Web browser, and accessing an application should just require a Web application services toolkit ”in short, a Web services toolkit. In a number of ways, this is how the Web services term was coined. Get the benefit of Web browsing for accessing not just user interfaces developed in HTML, but any application logic and data. Because Web services are based on open protocols and standards, the participating systems can be implemented in different technologies but still be available under a single coherent space. Change is also inevitable in corporate IT; what is a popular application framework today will be soon outdated , and a better framework will be available tomorrow. For example, compare the change when moving from the Microsoft ASP/COM “based framework to the Microsoft .NET Framework. Web services can be effectively utilized in this scenario: While going through the migration, a company may choose to expose a number of core features of its ASP/COM “based application using Web services and then slowly migrate its user interface, interaction, and eventually the complete application into .NET.