META Report: What Are Web Services, Anyway?

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Web services have been touted as the solution to many challenges corporate IT organizations face, enabling various types of application integration. They are also positioned as the foundation of a next-generation component model, as an e-business enabler, and as a means of achieving many of the business models that were once attributed to dot-coms. In fact, the marketplace definitions of Web services can be much more simply described and aligned, and the future development of Web services will likely follow a predictable course.

During 2002, early-adopter organizations that are using the Microsoft platform and infrastructure will utilize Web services integration in their e-business and CRM applications. Existing commercial services will begin transition to Web services technology. By 2003, most packaged business applications and newer custom applications will have fairly complete event-driven interfaces that will be exposed via the Web-services model, and Web services creation capability will be an automated part of virtually all development environments. In addition, commercial Web service availability will be growing rapidly. By 2004/05, Web services technology and interfaces will be a standard part of application integration, and commercial Web services utilization will be commonplace in many organizations.

To understand Web services, it is important to distinguish between the Web services technologies and Web services as a business concept.

Web Services Technology
Web services technology is a platform-independent, standards-based means of enabling asynchronous access to application interfaces. The principal components of Web services are:

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): This is the wire protocol for communicating messages between applications. The standard provides for SOAP to run over HTTP; however, bindings for other communications mechanisms, including popular messaging middleware technologies, are rapidly being developed and should be widely available in 2002.

• WSDL (Web Services Description Language): This is the machine-readable descriptions of Web services interfaces. Similar to Interface Definition Language (IDL) in concept, this provides programming environments with the information needed to expose Web services to the programmer.

• UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration): This is a directory service that will enable the discovery of Web services available to the developer.

Other proposed standards are part of Web services. They deal with several aspects of security, as well as means of describing information that is general to a trading partner that will use Web services to expose interfaces. In addition, some standardization efforts around a process description language would create a common means of describing the way that services interact with each other (e.g., if there were a "submit purchase order" service, the process language would describe what responses could be expected from this interface and what the original caller of the interface must do to complete the interaction).

META Trend

Through 2001/02, enterprise application integration will extend to encompass XML-based B2B integration and ultimately merge with application servers in a complete e-business infrastructure stack. During 2003/04, model-driven process automation increasingly will be used to describe system interactions, but standardization efforts (for trading partner, process, and business event definitions) will not succeed until lower-level specifications become a reality (2002/03). By 2004/05, frameworks for B2B will become standardized through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) process; however, adoption will be piecemeal and concentrated in vertical industries.

Web Services Business Concept
There is another set of Web services, which is really the exposure of business functions using the Web services technology. In fact, quite a few of these Web services currently exist. Examples include the package-tracking mechanisms offered by less-than-truckload shippers, the online credit reporting mechanisms offered by various credit bureaus, and numerous other services (e.g., Group 1 Software's Hotdata address verification service, Microsoft's Passport authorization service). Although few of these services currently use the Web services technology, most could be easily adapted to do so.

Many proponents of Web services are quick to extend this business concept to a world where there will be a huge number of Web services available "in the cloud," and users will be able to quickly create new applications by combining these Web services with internally developed services using a high-level abstraction mechanism. Although the technology to enable this scenario will be developed during the next two to three years, the reality of this situation will be somewhat different. This technology will enable businesses to combine services that they expose much more simply than they currently can, but those relationships will still be similar to the types of relationships that exist at present. For example, the Web services technology may make it easier to request and receive a credit report, but the requesting organization will still require a business agreement with the credit bureau that has been separately negotiated to have access to this service.

Using Web Services in the Near Term
As Web services technology becomes a part of standard application environments (2002), users should exploit these capabilities to simplify integration tasks. The initial uses of Web services will be to enable enterprise application integration (EAI) and to link e-business and some back-office applications. This will be accomplished by enabling these applications to expose their interfaces using the Web services technology. Once this is done, those interfaces will be available to existing EAI mechanisms without the need for any additional "adapter" technology. Interfaces exposed in this way may not have some of the functional benefits of current prebuilt proprietary adapters, but they will have the advantage of being built on a standard technology that will be well understood and accepted. In addition, Web services technology may also be used in situations where direct, point-to-point communications between applications is required, such as a new Web front end to an existing legacy application. However, until bindings to the high-capacity messaging middleware environments are implemented, these interface points will be most useful for occasional interactions.

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Business Impact: New technologies will streamline integration within and between companies but will not create radical changes to the business value proposition of integration.

Bottom Line: Users should utilize Web services technology to insulate themselves from changes in the integration marketplace. Web services will simplify integration technical activities and encourage the use of business-to-business automation.

By Daniel Sholler