Although web services are not something a customer buys the way he or she would buy servers or PCs or managed services, they are becoming an increasingly important set of nuts and bolts in the application integration toolbox of developers.
Web services help businesses make the different parts of their IT infrastructure communicate more quickly, holistically and efficiently. Eventually, web services will help many businesses talk to other businesses.
Saul Cunningham, principal sales consultant at middleware vendor Oracle, says web services are very broad, but it is important to understand the layers. “The base layer, which operates around XML data formats and then WSDL [XML, WSDL, SOAP and UDDI] are the core ones. They’re well understood and agreed upon,” he says. “That’s the primary layer, to do interoperability.”
Cunningham says the secondary layer deals with some newer issues -- such as web services security -- hindering the uptake of web services technology. Security can be solved by attention to standard website security technologies such as digital certificates and SSL. And the standard -- Web Services Security (WSS) or WS-Security -- is supported by vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, he says.
Other secondary layer items include web services addressing, processes, coordination and transactions. In the tertiary layer, there are things like BPEL, which coordinates low-level web services. “Most go through the security layer and then the transactional layer,” he says. The tertiary layer adds the ability for certain tools to be hidden, as it were, from the developer and leave the run-time environment to decide what to do, Cunningham says.
BPEL was formed from two rival specifications from IBM and Microsoft, who had then sat down and worked them into a single specification. Building distributed systems is complicated, he points out, so without standards the risk of building dead-end offerings is too high.
“[That situation] might have been the case a few years ago, but certainly not now,” Cunningham says. “[Also], with the PeopleSoft-Oracle merger, there’s a need to combine applications,” he says.
Web services help link the applications. "It’s still in the early adopter phase, but there is a lot of interest from customers," Cunningham says. Web services are often helping to build small to medium-scale systems as a platform for an overall architecture but, eventually, major systems will be actually web services-based and adoption will accelerate, he suggests.
“There are quite a lot of partners working and using our middleware doing web services -- Red Rock Consulting, Attain IT, LogicaCMG,” Cunningham says.
Partners are doing well so far, but need to go on building their web services skills and their abilities to communicate the benefits to customers. They should “absolutely” get involved, he says. “All the customers I talk to are definitely interested and most are looking at web services,” Cunningham says.
Bruce McCabe, analyst director of S2 Intelligence, has been watching web services develop and spread through business IT infrastructures for years.
In 2003, only about 100 Australia-based companies had been involved in “true” web services projects. Today, platforms are much more interoperable and “you couldn’t count” the companies using web services, McCabe says. “The great thing about web services is they’re a great equaliser, because they’re platform-independent standards for integration,” he says.
Not only have vendors worked together, but the standards themselves make it quicker, cheaper and easier for all kinds of players to get into integration deployments for all sizes of companies, McCabe says.
He agrees security is one of the biggest areas for web services development currently, particularly when it comes to moving into inter-organisation e-commerce hookups. “That’s the most critical area, and the reason for that is for the last few years people have had to choose transactions where they don’t worry about security or had a proprietary security player over the top,” McCabe says.
Businesses have clearly understood the benefits of web services in integration terms but total learning may take several more years. Resellers and service providers have a role to play there, he suggests. Web services may eventually even become available as packaged software -- opening up the arena for many smaller businesses.
“Anyone in the channel involved in integrating software and professional services -- and that’s a lot of them -- will find that web services will make those packages more convertible, modular and useful,” McCabe says.
However, he warns that vendors may not keep on playing happy families. Web services could be derailed from the track to universality if someone like Microsoft or IBM decides to “break the mould” and develop an incompatible version of web services. We had better hope that does not happen, McCabe says.
Near-instantaneous collaboration features attract many users to web services. The next Java Enterprise System will be much more web services-oriented and is available on a subscription basis, Wong points out.
He says partners must focus on customer business requirements and use web services to get there quicker. Sun helps with demand generation, training and marketing support. In Sun’s partner community, system integrators and some smaller resellers -- with about 20 developers -- are getting involved. “I know a developer up in Townsville, and they have a three-person organisation and they do all web services development for our customers up there,” Wong says. “But people have this view that it’s a big new thing, and it’s not.”
Web services merely build on all the web stuff that has gone before, Wong says.
Sun is not the only middleware vendor capitalising partly by offering web services tools. BEA is doing the same. This year, BEA released an SOA self-assessment tool aimed at helping users of its WebLogic Platform to build SOAs. Andrew Dutton, senior vice-president at BEA, says customers in Europe are definitely adopting SOAs and such tools are helping. “Companies are rediscovering that IT can help drive business innovation,” he said in a statement.
Tools that helped might include personalised portals, cross-channel infrastructures and interactive voice response systems. When web services are used to build SOAs, customers are enjoying improved customer service, operational efficiency and reduced complexity, Dutton said. Rita Arrigo, government business development manager at Victorian solutions provider WDG, says almost everyone that WDG works with now has some involvement in web services.
Once upon a time -- not so long ago -- developers used APIs or screen-scraping techniques to do the same integrations. That was more time-consuming and certainly more difficult and expensive. “You can change web services without having to change all the code,” Arrigo says.
Integration using applications like BizTalk can help an organisation make interdepartmental requests more quickly and efficiently. “You can get at the information that interests you in real time,” Arrigo says. “For example, we built something for a business part of the Victorian Government and they needed to talk from one department to another and another, throughout and across the database actually. For Swimming Australia, an umbrella organisation for thousands of swimming clubs around Australia, WDG used web services to help build a coordinated, rational system for entering intranet data on athletes, matches and other important and sometimes private information. Then, web services helped take that information and post it to the internet.
“We [used web services to] process content [for them] that looks really nice, that actually comes from Swimming Australia,” Arrigo says. Such work, while possible without web services, would likely prove much more difficult, especially if the swim clubs involved did not have the skill in-house to do a more “traditional” integration, she says.
Richard White, chief executive at NSW-based Microsoft .NET partner Eagle Datamation International, points to an August article in developer mag SD Times focusing on issues such as increasing complexity, schema incompatibility and overgrown documents. As XML has become more popular, difficulties have emerged. That’s a trajectory that often follows the market interest in new integration tools, White says.
XML schemas order semantics, content and structure of an XML document. But as they and their parent companies evolve, numerous versions emerge with accompanying incompatibilities and development dead ends, according to SD Times. SD Times lists some more common threats to web services-based applications. They include: XPath injections, where the attacker targets information by injecting “bad” data into an XPath query; XML bombs, which expand until the memory overflows and causes an error message; and XML Denial of Service attacks, where a very large XML file shuts down an application, using lots of CPU.
“Web services are a very neat establisher of rapport for electronic data transfer,” White says. Brad Kasell, engagement manager at IBM’s emerging technologies division, says web services are definitely on the up. Larger organisations such as banks and telcos are genuinely getting interested, he says. Effective core standards have really opened the door to web services, despite the recurrent whinging about there being just too many. “There’s a lot more critical mass in the market,” he says. “But when web services were first proposed, it was relatively simple then.”
Kasell says small companies -- and smaller IBM partners -- should find plenty of opportunities for their web services skills. Products like IBM’s Lotus Notes are getting a new lease of life via web services. Hands up, who wants to play?
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