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.
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