In the last few months there has been a marked increase in the noise level around web services but also a lot of confusion about what they are and what it all means.
So what is a web service? Well now the internet has connected vast numbers of machines, the dream is that a program running on one of these machines should be able to call a function located on another one of the machines. Instead of a human clicking on a link, and a web server responding with a web page, for example, we could have a procurement application request a product stock level from a suppliers stock control application. Of course, we could do this today, but we really want this to be general so we don't have to employ hordes of programmers to code each link individually. And that means standards and lots of them.
As usual in programming, we want to seperate out all the different parts into layers so we can deal with each piece individually. So we have XML for creating standards; SOAP and XML-RPC for transporting the function calls and results across the wire; WSDL and DISCO for describing the function calls and their parameters; ebXML and others for coding the data; Biztalk for mapping one data format to another; UDDI for registering and finding SOAP implementations; XLANG for describing the business processes; Microsoft's .Net for single signon (among many other capabilities), and so on and on. As you can tell from this mish mash, there are people working on all the layers simultaneously. And of course, various commercial interests are muddying the waters with FUD for their own ends.
With all the work on standards and particularly XML standards, I think we sometimes forget the gap between creating the standard and something happening in the real world. There's a sequence here from Standard Protocol to Toolkit to Application to Implementation. But the only bit that's actually important is the last of these. Without implementations, the rest of it is moot. Right now, we're at the stage of toolkits and prototypes. For example, it's only a matter of weeks since we achieved reasonable interworking between SOAP toolkits.
Back in the real world of B2B, and particularly this week's ROI topic of Catalogues. There is some huge potential here for B2B. We can imagine a situation where an e-Procurement application could connect direct to a Supplier's application to handle the whole of a buying process. And to do this with minimal, or maybe even no, integration effort. Some of the issues around catalogues that we're attempting to solve with Punch Out could be dealt with at the program level rather than people using the supplier's web site directly. But it still doesn't quite solve the discovery phase where you try and find a suitable product from an unknown supplier. UDDI is providing a search engine for web services and businesses, but they don't currently plan to index products. Resolvenet is another search initiative that may approach this. But unless some company or standards body comes up with a new distributed approach, it does look as though we'll be stuck with the pain of building aggregated catalogues for some time to come.
Despite these misgivings, the potential here is so huge that several commentators are talking in quite grandiose terms about all this. Some are calling it Internet 3.0 (1.0 was email, 2.0 was the WWW, 3.0 is connected applications) while Forrester has given it the name of "X Internet". There's no doubt that web services will change the game significantly, but in the mean time there's an awful lot of code to write before it has real impact.
Useful Links:
A consultant's view of the web services development effort http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?NewsID=2553&ml=1
Covisint and ebXML http://www.marketsandexchanges.com/index.asp?news=16588
Forrester: The Web will fade. It will be replaced by a new software paradigm. http://www.forrester.com/ER/Marketing/1,1503,214,FF.html
XML isn't all it's cracked up to be http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?NewsID=2569
User response slow to new B2B directory (UDDI) http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/stories/0,1199,NAV47-68-84-88-93_STO60235,00.html
[ << SOAP and Internet V3 ] [ The End of the Hub >> ]
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So what is a web service? Well now the internet has connected vast numbers of machines, the dream is that a program running on one of these machines should be able to call a function located on another one of the machines. Instead of a human clicking on a link, and a web server responding with a web page, for example, we could have a procurement application request a product stock level from a suppliers stock control application. Of course, we could do this today, but we really want this to be general so we don't have to employ hordes of programmers to code each link individually. And that means standards and lots of them.
As usual in programming, we want to seperate out all the different parts into layers so we can deal with each piece individually. So we have XML for creating standards; SOAP and XML-RPC for transporting the function calls and results across the wire; WSDL and DISCO for describing the function calls and their parameters; ebXML and others for coding the data; Biztalk for mapping one data format to another; UDDI for registering and finding SOAP implementations; XLANG for describing the business processes; Microsoft's .Net for single signon (among many other capabilities), and so on and on. As you can tell from this mish mash, there are people working on all the layers simultaneously. And of course, various commercial interests are muddying the waters with FUD for their own ends.
With all the work on standards and particularly XML standards, I think we sometimes forget the gap between creating the standard and something happening in the real world. There's a sequence here from Standard Protocol to Toolkit to Application to Implementation. But the only bit that's actually important is the last of these. Without implementations, the rest of it is moot. Right now, we're at the stage of toolkits and prototypes. For example, it's only a matter of weeks since we achieved reasonable interworking between SOAP toolkits.
Back in the real world of B2B, and particularly this week's ROI topic of Catalogues. There is some huge potential here for B2B. We can imagine a situation where an e-Procurement application could connect direct to a Supplier's application to handle the whole of a buying process. And to do this with minimal, or maybe even no, integration effort. Some of the issues around catalogues that we're attempting to solve with Punch Out could be dealt with at the program level rather than people using the supplier's web site directly. But it still doesn't quite solve the discovery phase where you try and find a suitable product from an unknown supplier. UDDI is providing a search engine for web services and businesses, but they don't currently plan to index products. Resolvenet is another search initiative that may approach this. But unless some company or standards body comes up with a new distributed approach, it does look as though we'll be stuck with the pain of building aggregated catalogues for some time to come.
Despite these misgivings, the potential here is so huge that several commentators are talking in quite grandiose terms about all this. Some are calling it Internet 3.0 (1.0 was email, 2.0 was the WWW, 3.0 is connected applications) while Forrester has given it the name of "X Internet". There's no doubt that web services will change the game significantly, but in the mean time there's an awful lot of code to write before it has real impact.
Useful Links:
A consultant's view of the web services development effort http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?NewsID=2553&ml=1
Covisint and ebXML http://www.marketsandexchanges.com/index.asp?news=16588
Forrester: The Web will fade. It will be replaced by a new software paradigm. http://www.forrester.com/ER/Marketing/1,1503,214,FF.html
XML isn't all it's cracked up to be http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?NewsID=2569
User response slow to new B2B directory (UDDI) http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/stories/0,1199,NAV47-68-84-88-93_STO60235,00.html
[ << SOAP and Internet V3 ] [ The End of the Hub >> ]
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