Vendor Strategies

Vendors have great influence on the success and failure of technologies in our industry. They have the research and development resources that can devise tools and solutions, and they have the marketing engines that can make these products successful. No standards body can compete with that.

But, with that in mind, vendors can also tend to get ahead of themselves. Trying to run before you walk can be a dangerous thing when working with technology. In the ongoing battle to be first to market, companies sometimes jump the gun on technology before it's truly tested and ready. This is as true with Web services as it was with Web browsers.

Many tools and services are both available and in development for building and supporting Web services. Some of these use current standards or standards efforts, and some are standalone solutions. As Web services continue to reveal themselves as solutions for an integration need, it is important to keep an eye on the vendor strategies.

In the next sections, we'll take a look at where many of the leading vendors in Web services are and which direction they are heading. We'll see what role Web services actually play in their strategy and which ones seem to be more marketing than substance. Equally important are which strategies seem to be in cooperation with other efforts and which ones are taking on the area with their own approach.

Ariba

Ariba is an industry leader in developing business-to-business (B2B) commerce marketplaces. Although it's not a direct player in the Web services market as of right now, I mention the company because of its involvement in developing some of the emerging standards related to Web services. In reality, its strategy is more focused on data integration than application integration.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, there is a big difference in focus between integrating data and integrating processes, and Ariba is definitely focused on the former. Instead of assisting developers in building applications (like IBM or Microsoft), the company is focused on delivering a platform of applications that helps companies exchange data with their partners. Ariba's core offering is a Value Chain Management (VCM) platform called the Ariba Commerce Services Network.

Ariba is one of the three key founders of the UDDI standard. (The other two are IBM and Microsoft.) Its interest in the UDDI effort is much more in the area of e-commerce than Web services. If UDDI does succeed in becoming the Yellow Pages of the Internet, Ariba wants to make sure that it and its marketplaces are involved. The company certainly knows the value in such a concept, and it is clearly a big driver and supporter of the standard.

Ariba was also involved in the first announcement of the WSDL standard, although its involvement has been less than it has been with UDDI. In both cases, Ariba has not trumpeted its involvement in those standards to the extent that IBM and Microsoft have.

You can find out more about Ariba and the company's products at http://www.ariba.com.

BEA

Creator of the popular Java application server WebLogic, BEA has been involved in many of the emerging standards around Web services. That involvement, however, has not led to a strong presence among the active Web services players in the industry. In fact, BEA's 6.0 release of WebLogic in June 2001 did not have any Web services-specific features or functionality.

One of WebLogic's main competitors is IBM's WebSphere Application server, and IBM has done a much better job of both producing tools focused on Web services and in capturing the Web services buzz. And, even though BEA has been involved in some standards efforts, those efforts pale when compared with IBM's or Microsoft's.

That said, BEA has made great strides through the summer of 2001 to catch up with the competition. First, it released a series of white papers on Web services architecture and adopting Web services with the BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform (http://www.bea.com/products/weblogic/server/paper_webservices.shtml). It followed that up with the release of WebLogic 6.1 in July 2001, which was self-described as the Web services release of WebLogic. Then, later that month, BEA acquired Microsoft rival Crossgain, presumably for its Web services expertise.

Although it seemingly got off to a late start, it looks as if BEA will be a big player in the near future, and its platform deserves some consideration if you plan to build Web services on the Java platform.

You can get more information on BEA and its products at http://www.bea.com.

Bowstreet

Bowstreet can easily be considered the earliest corporate proponent of Web services, or at least the concept because the name Web services came after its entry in the market.

Bowstreet was founded in January 1998 on the idea that companies will compete on the services they provide, not on the products they sell.

—Bowstreet Web site (http://www.bowstreet.com/aboutus/corporatehistory.html)

Bowstreet has focused on the integration of Web services into what the company literature calls business webs through tools that it provides. Although business webs are treated as a community of customers using Web services, it might be more appropriate, technically, to think of it as the integration of one or more Web services into an application.

Bowstreet's strategy has been fairly consistent since its inception: to minimize the bottlenecks that occur from the technical effort necessary to implement Web services. Their belief is that a company's IT department won't be able to keep up with the demands of business to utilize Web services. Although we certainly aren't there yet, once Web services do take off, we'll most likely see that Bowstreet has a valid point on where our limitations may lie in the adoption of Web services.

To address what Bowstreet believes is a fundamental limitation on the industry's ability to utilize Web services, it has developed a parametric approach to building applications utilizing Web services. This approach, brought to Bowstreet by Chief Technology Officer Andy Roberts, has been used in manufacturing for years to gain efficiencies by modeling products out of intersecting parts that allow designers to treat them as modular entities that are then interchangeable. Bowstreet has utilized this same approach in creating a software infrastructure, allowing companies and their partners to treat Web services as parts, plugging them into applications as needed.

To help customers build applications with Web services, Bowstreet offers three products, which consist of their overall solution: its Web services directory, the Business Web Factory, and the Business Web Portal.

Web Services Directory

Bowstreet's Web services directory was one of the first attempts at cataloging Web services that are available from companies and organizations. The directory can be accessed through its Web Factory and Web Portal product or through a browser at http://www.bowstreet.com/webservicesdirectory/webservices. Bowstreet's objective is to get providers to list its Web services on this directory so that Business Web Factory users can discover and implement them more easily. (See Figure 9-2.)

Figure 9-2: Bowstreet's Web services directory

Bowstreet developed an ontology that organizes the services across industries, companies, and functionality to help service seekers find the available services. The directory contains more than 10,000 services, and, even with the ontology, it can be time consuming to look through, especially if you are looking for something specific. It well illustrates the need for a good standard to organize and display available Web services.

The directory is split into two different categories at the highest level: Business Level Building Blocks and Enabling Technology. Unfortunately, the services referenced in the directory probably distort most people's definition of what Web services are. The Building Blocks category consists of several standalone applications, Web-based interfaces, and even document schemas for integration systems that could hardly be called Web services as we have come to understand them in this book. The Enabling Technology category consists of more presentation-centric services that are specific to Bowstreet's Business Web Factory. Looking through this portion of the directory might remind you of looking through online catalogs of VB controls or Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs).

Business Web Factory

The Business Web Factory is the core of Bowstreet's solution set for companies implementing Web services. It is an application server that is specifically catered to Web services-based applications and consists of two components: Designer and Customizer. Designer is the interface that allows the owner to add services to their collection of offerings available to their customers and partners. The Customizer then allows those customers and partners to generate a custom application catered to their needs.

To illustrate this relationship, think of AAA Conferences as the Business Web Factory owner. It would consume the hotel reservation system functionality through the factory, allowing users to check hotel availability, retrieve hotel content, and make a reservation. Through the software, AAA Conferences could customize the process for each event, if necessary. It could even provide different content for multiple devices, such as WAP, handhelds, and Web browsers. If these customizations were not necessary, it might be difficult to justify using the Business Web Factory. Because it is designed for "massively customized" service offerings, if your services are not either massive or customized, the value may not be realized from the infrastructure that Bowstreet provides.

The other caveat for benefiting from Bowstreet's Business Web Factory is that you are the owner of the application. If you are not the first link in the chain (as we discussed in Chapter 2) and do not host the user interface, you will not be able to take advantage of the benefits from using the factory. The Customizer does not allow partners "as is" to specify profiles for services that have no user interface. In fact, Bowstreet's current offerings do not provide a lot of assistance to pure Web services providers. If they were to take this same approach to provide a more back-end-centric solution, it would definitely be a product worth considering for managing the consumer profiles and dynamic interfaces that we first discussed in Chapter 5.

If you do plan on providing multiple services through your own interface to multiple customers or even multiple devices, the Business Web Factory is well worth considering. Between its process logic for capturing profiles for multiple partners and the easy user interface that those partners can use for creating a profile, the Business Web Factory will not only help relieve the burden on your IT department, but will also speed the adoption of your services.

Business Web Portal

The Business Web Portal is the latest offering from Bowstreet that capitalizes on the success of Business Web Factory by generating customized enterprise portals for an organization. Just as partners can take advantage of the Business Web Factory to build custom applications, internal staff can utilize the Business Web Portal to aggregate internal services (ranging from email to ERP systems to CRM solutions) into a single portal interface for business users.

For the same reasons you would consider the Business Web Factory, you would consider the Business Web Portal. If you want to deliver massively customized enterprise applications using Web services, there is currently no better solution that Bowstreet's offering.

You can get more information on Bowstreet, the Business Web Factory, and its other offerings at http://www.bowstreet.com.

Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard's offering in the Web services space is E-speak, an open services platform. As you might imagine from the name, E-speak has a broader scope than just Web services, including any method for collaborating over the Internet. This includes shared data as much as shared processes.

Although HP has been involved in some of the major standards initiatives for Web services, the company has remained fairly steadfast in its own platform since unveiling it in 1999. They even refer to Web services as e-services, seemingly rejecting the name that the rest of the industry has accepted.

Although most of their focus seems to be on competing with data-exchange platforms like RosettaNet and BizTalk, HP does provide a solution that supports Web services in concept, if not in name. In fact, HP's biggest contribution to Web services may have been its architecture, which was the first service-oriented architecture released by a major vendor.

• A service-oriented architecture (SRO) is a conceptual architecture that defines a loosely coupled system, allowing processes to interact without breaking when a change or error occurs.

Unfortunately, the proprietary underpinnings of E-speak likely kept it from taking off as hoped. E-speak itself actually consists of two components: E-speak Service Framework Specification and Netaction (formerly the E-speak Service Engine.)

E-speak Service Framework Specification

HP's Service Framework Specification (SFS) is a set of standards that will allow e-services to interact. SFS is touted as a complete end-to-end solution that incorporates the discovery and integration of e-services. Through an asynchronous messaging framework based on XML, it can even allow the negotiation and agreement of terms to aid in building the business relationship between partners.

Although it is a proprietary (but open source) specification, it does support many of the emerging standards for Web services such as SOAP and UDDI. The specification is also designed to be platform and language neutral. The only implementation available based on the E-speak specification is HP's own Netaction.

Netaction Software Suite

Netaction is the latest release of what was previously called the E-speak Service Engine. This incarnation utilizes the J2EE application server that HP acquired when it purchased Bluestone Software in January 2001. Netaction is intended to target enterprises that want to develop, integrate, and deploy e-services. Netaction also signaled a change in HP's strategy by utilizing some standards (like SOAP) within E-speak, but it still contains proprietary components.

The initial industry feedback after the first release of this suite has been mediocre. Most of the criticism has been related to a lack of integration and some of the deficiencies with the E-speak specification. But, although E-speak is standing in defiance of the current standards efforts, the neutral approach to platforms could make Netaction a powerful solution for bridging the gap between the Microsoft and Java platforms. With future releases, it will surely be looking to compete with the more seasoned IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's .NET platform. Netaction is currently available on any platform supporting JDK 1.2.2 and higher.

You can get more information on E-speak from HP's Web site (http://www.hp.com/e-speak) and the E-speak community site (http://www.e-speak.net).

IBM

IBM is another company that is well positioned to be the bridge between the Microsoft and Java worlds with its aggressive work in deploying tools and solutions for Web services. IBM is the only vendor that can hope to compete with Microsoft's developer following, and the company has only increased that strength with its involvement in open source and Linux specifically.

IBM has worked side by side with Microsoft on several of the emerging standards for Web services including SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Web services truly caught the industry's attention when these two rivals started cooperating to define standards to support them.

WebSphere Application Server

IBM's core offering for exposing Web services is its popular WebSphere Application Server. With version 4.0, this server—which supports the latest versions of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI—claims to be the most complete application server for Web services available on the market.

The engine itself is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform with full certification; it is available on more than 35 platforms. As we saw in Chapter 6, it is not an overly intuitive application server, so don't expect to pick it up overnight. If you go with a complete IBM development environment (IBM HTTP Server and Visual Age), you will maximize the benefits of WebSphere and its interaction with those products. Deviating from that combination will require even more time for setup and troubleshooting development issues.

Web Services Toolkit

For those who don't want to use IBM WebSphere for their application platform, there are also a host of other Java libraries and toolkits that are freely available for download from the alphaworks site (http://alphaworks.ibm.com). Chief among those offerings is the Web Services Toolkit (WST).

IBM's Java-based WST provides a runtime environment for developing Web services utilizing SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. It also includes several samples for developers to work with and learn from for both the Windows and Linux platforms. This toolkit has also been regularly updated to incorporate the latest releases of standards.

For more information on the Web Services Toolkit, refer to the Alphaworks WST download page at http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit.

Web Services Test Area

The Web Services Test Area is actually IBM's UDDI browser, giving users visibility into some of the Web services hosted in the test area (http://demo.alphaworks.ibm.com/browser). With it, you can browse Web services that are listed, finding information on any one of them. (See Figure 9-3.)

Figure 9-3: IBM UDDI browser

For more information on IBM and its products, visit their corporate site (http://www.ibm.com).

Microsoft

Microsoft has been very involved in helping to develop the emerging standards for Web services. However, Microsoft has also been very deliberate in demonstrating a lack of support for standards—such as ebXML and XAML—with which it does not agree either politically or technically. In the standards that Microsoft does intend to support, the company almost always takes a leadership role in helping to drive its direction.

Regardless of your feelings about Microsoft's products or approach to business, you have to recognize it has learned its lesson from getting a late jump on the Internet in 1995. In fact, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was one of the first to publicly use the phrase Web services in September 1999. Ever since, the company has been very aggressive in trying to capitalize on the potential of Web services, which led to a fundamental shift in corporate strategy in June 2000.

.NET

Microsoft's corporate-wide focus is the .NET platform. Although it has at times been somewhat of a confusing marketing message, fundamentally, the idea behind .NET is "software as a service" (in other words, Web services). Microsoft has long focused on software, and particularly the operating system as the core of its strategy. This shift from software to services is a significant undertaking that will ultimately change Microsoft's business model.

Although the .NET platform includes a host of products (which are categorized as tools, servers, XML Web services, clients, and .NET experiences), at the core is the .NET framework. With a Common-Language Runtime (CLR), this framework allows all of Microsoft's languages (Visual C++, Visual Basic, JScript, and the new C#) to take advantage of a common set of functionality. In fact, Microsoft has exposed .NET to allow other vendors or organizations to enable other languages through this CLR. Fujitsu took advantage of this opportunity to provide COBOL. NET, enabling COBOL developers to build applications on the .NET platform.

Another potential advantage facilitated by this CLR is inherent interoperability among the supported languages. Previously, the Microsoft platform facilitated interaction among different languages through the COM/DCOM layer. Whereas applications had to enable this layer to take advantage of this interoperability, .NET makes it more seamless. This means that VB developers will be able to take advantage of the functionality in C# as easily as functionality in VB code.

Similar to the approach that Java takes by having a portable virtual machine, the CLR also gives the potential for Microsoft or others to create a portable runtime environment. Efforts are already underway by Corel to provide a CLR implementation on the freeBSD platform, and other vendors have announced similar plans for other platforms. The first operating system that will come with the .NET framework built-in will be the upcoming "Whistler" release from Microsoft currently scheduled for 2002.

The .NET platform consists of the following five areas:

• Tools— IDE for developers to design, build, and deploy Web services

• Servers— The enterprise servers that will support .NET Web services and applications (such as SQL and BizTalk)

• Services— Building block services that will serve as the core to many other services and applications

• Clients— Devices and systems that will consume .NET processes and applications

• Experiences— Access to information in an integrated fashion

Visual Studio .NET

Visual Studio .NET is the tool that Microsoft has created for helping developers to build the next generation of applications for the .NET platform. With Visual Studio .NET, building both thickand thin-client applications will be made much easier by the tighter integration possible through the CLR.

Building a Web interface is now as simple as building form interfaces with Web Forms. This drag-and-drop interface will allow developers to treat Web elements as controls to create their Web applications. Form interfaces are also getting revamped with the Windows Forms package. With this new package, interface designers can utilize visual inheritance for control reusability, greater precision in element sizing and placement, and more-powerful graphics that will allow designers to break out of the typical gray boxes.

Another version of Visual Studio, called Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect, also provides more functionality in the areas of software modeling, database modeling, and development frameworks and templates. This release will work with VS .NET to provide architecture guidance to developers as they work.

For more information on the .NET platform and Visual Studio .NET, check out the book C# and the .Net Platform by Andrew Troelsen (Apress). You can also get more information at Microsoft's .NET site (http://www.microsoft.com/net).

Hailstorm

The single biggest challenge for .NET adoption is the pricing model. However, this same challenge applies to all Web services. Web services could be priced by use, subscription, or through indirect pricing like advertising and value-added services. To test the waters in this area, Microsoft has created Hailstorm.

Hailstorm is a suite of Web services provided by Microsoft on a subscription basis. With beta releases due towards the end of 2001 and a full release in 2002, Hailstorm will be based on Microsoft's Passport service. This will be an avenue for users to store and access personal information such as calendars, address books, and payment preferences through a variety of devices. Hailstorm will utilize the SOAP standard, making it available to any development platform, but it will no doubt integrate best through the Visual Studio .NET IDE.

Although the final implementation of Hailstorm is not known at this time, the services that Microsoft is promising will actually be a blending of Web services and Peer2Peer services as we discussed in Chapter 5. Through this service, users will be able to connect directly with Hailstorm to enter information, authorize access, and set preferences. Applications will then be able to request that information to provide users with a more streamlined and personalized service.

The biggest obstacle to Hailstorm will likely not be technical, but political. This service will require users to place a great deal of trust in Microsoft and its service, and some privacy advocacy groups are likely to get involved in this area. Although Microsoft may take some abuse by being the first one to take this step, the company will clearly have the advantage in consumer Web services if it can clear this privacy hurdle.

MSXML Parser

Prior to the .NET platform and tools shipping, Microsoft has led the way in providing XML parsers. First previewed in March 2000 and currently on version 4.0, the parser has been updated constantly to keep up with the revised specifications of XML Schema, SAX, and DOM. As we saw in Chapters 6 through 8, Microsoft has added some great features to allow developers to utilize the MSXML parser as their one-stop shop for building and consuming Web services.

SOAP Toolkit

For those who don't make the immediate jump to Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft has a SOAP toolkit that helps developers expose their COM objects as Web services through Visual Studio 6. Similar to IBM's Web Services Toolkit, this kit comes with plenty of samples and utilities that allow developers to build and deploy Web services fairly quickly utilizing SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. It is available for free on Microsoft's Web services site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices).

Sun

Sun's party line is that, while other vendors are jumping on the Web services bandwagon, Sun was doing it all along; they just called it something different. Because Sun has been involved in XML since its inception and has been developing remote processes through RMI and CORBA, the company believes that experience is on its side. If you believe that solutions are defined entirely by their underlining technology, you might buy into this reasoning.

Because Web services are old news to them, Sun has taken the concept one step further by promoting "smart services." These are services that would dynamically connect based on a scenario, negotiating the connection and communication in real time, and consuming each other. Sun refers to this as spontaneous federation, and it takes the concept of Web services and merges it with smart devices or agents. As I have said before, although the vision is feasible, we need to make sure that we learn to build and deploy these simple "static" Web services before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

Although Sun has eventually supported the major Web services standards being developed, it is clearly more interested in the potential of ebXML. In fact, Sun is the biggest company to fully embrace ebXML. Of course, this means that, even though Sun supports the non-ebXML flavor of Web services standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), it has plenty of opinions on its shortcomings. Most of them revolve around its eagerness to push Web services into real-time connectivity, which those standards have some support for, but have not been targeted for.

Sun ONE

Sun announced its Web services strategy in February 2001 and unveiled Sun ONE (Open Net Environment). ONE is a solution consisting of Sun's Java 2 enterprise platform, Forte development tools, and iPlanet software.

Philosophically, Sun is using ONE to promote its belief in using open standards to develop applications that are interoperable. If thinking of the Internet as a series of interconnected nodes, the company believes that the adoption of Web services will be hindered if every node on the Internet does not look very similar. It proposes that Java be the language that runs on every node because Java is so portable. Of course, this theory makes more sense if you believe that every node will be using services in the same way for the same purposes. Whenever customization is introduced into these nodes, the argument for deploying duplicate logic throughout tends to provide far less benefit. Unfortunately, very few organizations have similar back end systems, which means that they all need different middleware to either expose them as Web services or incorporate Web services into their processes.

Logically, ONE is defined by Sun as consisting of seven components:

• Platform— Operating system, virtual machine, and device

• Service Creation and Assembly— Development environments

• Identity and Policy— Security and profile management

• Service Container— Technologies for deploying Web services to end users

• Service Delivery— Technologies for delivering content and information

• Service Integration— Technologies that can bridge systems or platforms

• Applications and Web Services— Technologies that can deliver services components and applications

Technically, ONE consists of an architecture based on Java and XML. More specifically, a series of Java APIs are available that will provide all the necessary functionality for building and consuming Web services within a Java application:

• Java API for XML Processing (JAXP)— Provides support for the DOM, SAX, and XSLT standards

• Java API for XML Data Binding (JAXB)— Allows developers to bind XML Schemas to Java objects

• Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM)— Provides support for asynchronous XML messaging systems

• Java APIs for XML-based RPC (JAX/RPC)— Allows remote procedure calls via SOAP

• Java API for WSDL (JWSDL)— Provides support for WSDL

• Java API for XML Registries (JAXR)— An interface into Web services directories and repositories like the UDDI Business Registry and the ebXML registry

These six APIs were established by the Java Community Process (JCP). You can find more information on JCP at its Web site (http://jcp.org). Aside from these APIs, the value proposition of Sun ONE is the J2EE platform itself with its iPlanet server product. Developers who are familiar with it will no doubt feel comfortable building Web services using this platform, but IBM and BEA both offer viable alternatives to Java developers building and deploying Web services.

WebTop

The first initiative specific to the Sun ONE platform is WebTop. This is described as "a development tool for providers to deliver productivity tools in a hosted environment." The goal is for WebTop to provide consistent access to applications across a variety of devices, allowing users to distance themselves from their desktop and yet remain productive. This "true smart Web service" was in beta testing as of July 2001.

You can get more information on Sun ONE and WebTop at Sun's site (http://www.sun.com/software/sunone).