Talking to a stranger

Laurie Wong, software product manager at Sun, says a lot of the ratified standards are now in their second iteration. Vendors have indeed put aside their differences for the greater good and that has given customers confidence to invest, he maintains. Sun is continuing to invest in its own web services development. It has released Studio Creator for the visual Java development environment for web services, for instance. Studio Creator aims to help developers quickly put up web services applications, Wong 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?