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Web Services Architect Article Archive Wednesday July 24 2002 Security for Web Services Web Services security has been the most talked about thing in the Web Services arena for quite some time now. If there's one thing that has slowed the widespread acceptance and implementation of Web Services, it's their lack of security standards. There also seems to be a cautious implementation schedule for many companies that are thinking about moving to the .NET platform. Partly because of security concerns I would imagine, and partly to give the technology time to grab hold. Nevertheless, security is still a major concern that holds back most of the Web Service implementations today. Wednesday June 26 2002 Web Services and Straight Through Processing Web Services in the Financial Industry This article discusses the fundamentals of STP, the need for, driving forces behind, and benefits of STP, the current state of technology supporting STP, and the relationship of enterprise and business-to-business application integration and business process management with STP. It further looks at the critical parameters for the success of STP, and examines the application of SOA-based framework to STP. There is also a discussion on the usage of Web Services for STP. Friday June 21 2002 Web Services Architect Survey Results We recently ran a survey, asking readers to answer a few questions about themselves and their involvement with Web Services. The survey ran from 22 May - 19 June 2002, and we received 775 responses. Wednesday May 29 2002 One year on from its inception, Web Services Architect takes another look at Web Services, drawing on movements in the industry and valuable feedback from the people who matter the most - our audience. An update, if you will, to our view of Web Services. Wednesday May 22 2002 Web Services and Virtual Enterprises Virtual Building Blocks The notion of "virtual enterprises" has been around for quite sometime and in some ways most IT efforts are concentrated on realizing some of the features of virtual enterprises, even without recognizing or labeling them as such. The term "virtual enterprise" itself has undergone several versions or modifications. Some synonyms include "virtual corporation," "virtual organization," and, more recently, "extended enterprises." In this article, we'll take a look at how Web Services can help us to create a virtual enterprise. Wednesday May 15 2002 Web Services Solution for HIPAA Compliance Using J2EE-based Web Services The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, The Act) is poised to become the next Year 2000 or Euro issue in terms of deadlines and revenue expenditures. What sets The Act apart from Y2K, however, is the geographical impact region - only the USA in this case. Just as solution providers are rising up after the economic downturn, this is a golden opportunity to both bring in new business and introduce new technologies into an otherwise legacy applications sector. This article looks at a J2EE-based Web Services methodology which can be used to provide industry standard solutions. Wednesday May 8 2002 Web Services and Remote References An Intimidating Task? What are "remote references", and how do they relate to distributed object technology? Are the concepts of a remote object reference still applicable for Web Services technology? This article describes briefly the software architecture concept of remote references, and shows why they are best avoided when using XML Web Services due to the fundamental mismatch between the service oriented middleware approach of Web Services and the object oriented middleware required to support a remote reference architecture. We recently ran a survey, asking readers to answer a few questions about themselves and their interest in Web Services. The survey ran from 10 – 29 April 2002, and we received 1004 responses. Here we present the results. Wednesday May 1 2002 Web Services and Peer-to-Peer Computing Companion Technologies With Peer-to-Peer computing on the increase, we take a look at how Web Services can get involved. This article discusses the convergence between Web Services and P2P computing. We engage in a discussion of how Web Services and P2P technologies alleviate each other's core complexities, the applications of the two, and the challenges of using Web Services for P2P computing. Wednesday April 24 2002 Web Services and the Real Estate Industry House Buying Made Easier In selected industries, such as Finance, Insurance, and Travel, companies are already beginning to tap into the power of Web Services, enabling them to integrate easily with new business partners, provide powerful new services to consumers, and position themselves for long term growth. This article focuses on how Web Services can revolutionize the Real Estate Industry. Is it true? Are they all just smoke and mirrors, or is there something worthwhile behind the media frenzy that seems to surround Web Services? There is no denying that Web Services will prove useful, but to whom and how? We take a quick look at the current reality. Wednesday April 17 2002 Enterprise Resource Planning and Web Services The Third Wave Every major technology goes through a series of revolutions or "waves" with each wave building upon the generation before it, and ERP is no exception. The first wave of ERP was the onset of computers in manufacturing. This was followed by a wave where specialized ERP applications began to emerge. Web Service based ERP solutions constitute what can be appropriately termed as the Third Wave in Enterprise Resource Planning. This article looks at who the major players in the foray are. Wednesday April 10 2002 Business Process Standards for Web Services The candidates The convergance of two major trends in electronic business integration is creating a rapidly growing demand for a new breed of software that facilitates automation of business processes, both between enterprises and within the enterprise. The first of these trends is Web Services, the second is a business driver: the need to automate public and private business processes. Wednesday April 3 2002 The State of Java Web Services Taking the temperature at JavaOne This year's JavaOne conference, the premier Java conference run by Sun Microsystems each year in San Francisco CA, was a quiet affair, but a more interesting and mature one than last year from a Web Services point of view. So what does this tell us about the state of Java Web Services? We look at the salient issues for Web Services architects: security, distributed transactions, identity and the Liberty Alliance, and Sun's ongoing relationship with Microsoft. Wednesday March 27 2002 Web Services and Application Frameworks Working Together This article discusses how providers of application frameworks (J2EE and .NET) are adopting support of Web Services standards and capabilities into their development tools, application servers, and server software. As well as looking at the key differences between the J2EE and .NET frameworks as far as their support for Web Services is concerned, we look at an example of Web Services and application servers. Wednesday March 20 2002 Web Services and your car In this article, we take a look at the application of Web Services in the area of logistics. Our case study offers an insight into a slightly unusual aspect of logistics, in that it doesn't pertain to the shipping of large quantities of goods. Rather, we see how Web Services are getting into our cars. Wednesday March 13 2002 Current status and the future At the InfoWorld Next Gen Web Services conference in January 2002, 51% of the attendants considered security the single largest obstacle to general acceptance of Web Services. Are these fears warranted, or are these people just scared of something they don't fully understand? Is the security of Web Services so precarious? Can we overcome these problems so that businesses and the general public will trust these services? We'll take a look at these issues and give our evaluation of the situation. Wednesday March 6 2002 E-Logistics Processes Integration Framework ELPIF and Web Services In recognition of the increasing importance of globalization and the resulting need for greater, faster, and more flexible communications, a framework is required to allow any company to establish itself in no time or make optimum use of their legacy applications and run efficiently with minimal cost input. This article briefly presents such a framework called ELPIF (E-Logistics Processes Integration Framework) for e-logistics processes integration based on Web Services via incorporating (1) common alliance interface, (2) adaptation layer, and (3) dynamic data binding mechanism. This framework can be adopted as a new service delivery model that uses a design pattern, business process inheritance, and solution templates. Wednesday February 27 2002 Testing for SOAP Interoperability Testing Web Services Clients Currently, the limitations arising because of the differences between implementations of the SOAP specifications from Apache and Microsoft are being circumvented with in-house solutions. Third party tools can be used to test SOAP messages and WSDL for interoperability and service implementation. Meanwhile, Microsoft and IBM, longtime rivals in the Web Development industry, have been working together to resolve their differences. Wednesday February 20 2002 UDDI Based Electronic Marketplaces Easier Integration with UDDI and WSDL eMarketplaces are designed to bring together businesses on the Web. Both buyers and sellers should be able to interact with each other inside an architecture that is easy to use and maintain. eMarketplace owners can implement several types of processes depending upon their target audience, operations, and finance models. The greatest benefits lie with cost reduction for all players and the ability to reach otherwise untapped business prospects. This article discusses how UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) work together to form the core architecture of the next generation e-commerce model. Wednesday February 13 2002 Digital Signatures and Web Services Signing Your Service Digital Signatures are a standard in security and cryptography for applications, and are becoming more widespread in their use. We will take a look at industry standards and support for use of Digital Signatures in the Web Service area. We will incorporate reasons why Digital Signatures are important, as well as why they are being adopted quickly. Wednesday February 6 2002 Web Services and the Banking Industry Finance and the Future The concept of Web Services has been closely watched and enthusiastically explored by many in the financial services industry. In this article, we take a look at how the financial industry is looking at Web Services, what Web Services mean to them, and what a couple of companies are doing. Wednesday January 30 2002 Integration Brokers and Web Services Will Web Services Support be Just Another Feature? This article discusses the usage of Web Services with Integration Broker solutions. We look at the relationship between integration brokers and Web Services with the help of an elaborate example, and the return on investment in using integration brokers that support Web Services. Wednesday January 23 2002 How they stack up In this article, we will take a look at the Web Services Architecture technology stacks from WebServices.org, IBM, and the W3C. The architecture of a Web Services stack varies from one organization to another, and the number and complexity of layers for the stack depend on the organization. Each stack requires Web Services interfaces to get a Web Services client to speak to an application server or middleware, such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and .NET. To enable the interface, you need Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), SOAP with Attachments (SwA), and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) among other Internet protocols. Wednesday January 16 2002 WSIL: Do we need another Web Services Specification? Explaining the difference between UDDI The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification started out with and still has very noble intentions. The promise of UDDI is simple: to provide a place where service creators can publish their services and service consumers can search for and ultimately integrate with services for consumption. But let's face it; UDDI is not really fulfilling its promise. In fact, preliminary results from independent research and tests conducted by SalCentral makes it pretty obvious that UDDI has yet a long way to go. Wednesday January 9 2002 A Comparison of Approaches With the hype surrounding .NET Web Services, and Sun bringing together an offering for Web Services, it's time we took a look at what's happening. In this article, we compare the two approaches to Web Services, along with examining why you might want to use one method or the other. Wednesday January 2 2002 An Intimidating Task? This article discusses the fundamentals of Business to Business Integration (B2Bi), the need for companies to integrate their systems, the challenges of B2Bi, the usefulness of Web Services in B2Bi, and limitations in the current state of Web Services for their usage in B2Bi. Wednesday December 19 2001 Repositioning and Enterprise Applications Conspicuous by their absence from the Web Services party, to date Oracle have been pushing a distinctly last-year message with Oracle9i AS, their J2EE application server, and their flagship Oracle9i database. The application architecture is the usual web browser client, application server, and database, but it has been taken to the limit, with Java clients, caching servers, firewall interoperability, and scaling and failover technology. Essentially, though, it's about the creation of one centralized data island, and enterprise application integration (EAI) is not addressed except with the suggestion that you migrate existing systems to a single instance of Oracle9i. That's good for Oracle's revenues, but it's not the most practical solution for companies happy with existing or legacy systems that need integration with newer services, or are looking to expand systems integration to trading partners. Wednesday December 12 2001 The Birth of the UDDI Value Added Service Supplier UDDI based Web Services Intermediaries In one of my previous articles I mentioned in some detail about the architecture surrounding Web Services. In retrospect I'd like to prove one of my points concerning value added services. The UDDI registry is undoubtedly the way forward for businesses today, however I've often been asked how do other independent directory sites such as www.salcentral.com and www.xmethods.com fit within the overall architecture. Wednesday December 5 2001 Learning from the Mistakes of E-Commerce? Translating the dot.com Experience for Web Services Given that Web Services will be using similar technologies to e-commerce, is it fair to compare them? Can we look at the "mistakes" of e-commerce and learn from them for Web Services? Well, we can try - surely there is enough common ground between the two technologies to allow for this comparison. In this article, we look at mistakes or myths of e-commerce, how they can be applied to Web Services, and what we can learn from the past. Wednesday November 28 2001 The Outlook is Mixed Over the next few years many tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Web Services will be made available across the world. Many of these will find their way onto the UDDI registry, a registry which when it delivers on all of its promises will revolutionize the way we do business with others by allowing us to search in a systematic way for help, contacts and functionality (Web Services) that other companies supply. Wednesday November 21 2001 Adding Value to Web Services We are now at the stage where we are seeing a growing number of Web Services implementations across several industries. These initial implementations have served to not only reinforce the fact that Web Services provide tremendous value but at the same time, they serve to identify pieces in the Web Services puzzle that need to be present in order to effectively implement these solutions. In this article, we shall take a look at an entity called the Web Service Intermediary. Wednesday November 14 2001 Secret Mergers and Acquisitions Weapon How Web Services can help you Integrate your next Acquisition Anyone who's been through a merger knows that integration is everything. If the new company is able to integrate its systems and processes, then there is a chance of success. If not, there generally isn't. As the M&A climate heats up, corporate decision-makers - both business and IT strategists - should look to Web Services as a way of smoothing out the inherently messy business of bringing disparate entities together. Wednesday November 7 2001 Network Security and Web Services Deployment Ideas for securing your services These days, building a secure network infrastructure involves much research and implementation planning. The fundamental strategy of building a secure environment involves letting subscribers access authorized resources without hindrances while ensuring that intruders fail to gain access. In this article we will be looking at one of the strategies and concepts involved in implementing the necessary security measures related to Web Services deployment. Wednesday October 31 2001 CapeConnect Three From Cape Clear Software Early Release Assessment When it comes to toolkits and frameworks, the major vendors such as IBM and Microsoft seem to be making all the noise. There are, though, smaller players who are quietly making the deployment of Web Services easier and quicker with their more innovative products. One such Web Services platform that is currently attracting a lot of attention is CapeConnect from Cape Clear Software. Cape Clear just recently announced the latest upgrade to their Web Services Platform with the release of CapeConnect Three. Wednesday October 24 2001 Smart Web Crawlers For All Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries provide a mechanism to browse through and discover Web Services and interact with them in a meaningful way (visit UDDI.org, the birthplace and official web site of UDDI). In order to explain this concept, we will first discuss its usage model (operation of Smart Web Crawlers) and then discuss its internal architecture. Towards the end of this article, we will explain the process of searching through a UDDI registry. Wednesday October 17 2001 Easier Enterprise Application Integration? As companies move in the direction of collaborative business-to-business e-commerce, they will first have to look inward to their own internal systems, applications and processes. Several business processes span across multiple internal applications. These applications must be able to communicate dynamically in real-time before a company can effectively e-communicate with the outside world. Wednesday October 10 2001 Web Services and Mobile Intelligent Agents Combining Intelligence with Mobility How can we combine the automation provided by mobile intelligent agents, with the location and platform agnostic features of Web Services? Clearly we would need to make our mobile agents platform agnostic as well, but is that all? What constitutes a mobile agent, and how can we say it has artificial intelligence? The answers to these questions should become clear in this article. Wednesday October 3 2001 Establishing Trust in Web Services As the hype surrounding Web Services shows few signs of relenting, people are beginning to ask more searching questions. In this age of rapid communications, particularly apparent in discussion sites and articles posted across the Internet, there are many aspects of Web Services under question. Wednesday September 26 2001 Enabling Web Services with BEA WebLogic Using WebLogic and CapeConnect from CapeClear BEA Systems, Inc., announced full support for Web Services in release 6.1 of their industry leading WebLogic Application Server. Though they had provided this starting from the Beta release of Version 6.1, it was not until the formal release of version 6.1 that developers really started getting serious about taking a look at their Web Services support. Wednesday September 19 2001 Servers and Relationships under the .Net Infrastructure How Enterprise Servers can help You For the Enterprise planning to support Web Services, there lie many alternatives as far as platforms and servers are concerned. Within the Microsoft .Net architecture that supports the Web Services model of application development and deployment is a series of Servers that assist not only in the application deployment, but also in the areas of maintenance, management, and security. Wednesday September 12 2001 Organizing Web Services If businesses want to benefit from the power of the Internet, web sites have to evolve. It is often no longer beneficial for them to only provide static information. It is necessary for these web sites to find ways that allow them to interact with other websites, operating systems, and applications. With Web Services it is finally possible to create functions that can easily be accessed over the Internet by both internal and external parties. In other words, with Web Services it is possible to integrate different value chains from different organizations with ease. Wednesday September 5 2001 The Competition Heats Up Having missed the boat in the early stages of XML and SOAP development, Sun was shaping up to play the role of a follower, rather than a leader, in the nascent world of Web Services. However, as Java is establishing itself as the natural tool for serious server side development, and there are signs that J2EE standards are becoming more accepted, Sun may well have begun its fight back into the heart of Web Services activity. Wednesday August 29 2001 Making Money out of Selling Web Services – Part II Show me the Revenue In part I we examined the need to build a proper business model for Web Services, and avoid the mistakes that characterise so many dotcom failures. In part II, we will look at specific charging mechanisms in more detail, and suggest some strategies for generating sustainable revenue from this emergent technology. Wednesday August 22 2001 Making Money out of Selling Web Services – Part I Show me the Business Model It seems that we're coming to a crossroads in Web Services technology. I don't wish to paint a bleak picture, but few people in the industry have, at this time, actually sat down and considered how Web Services publishers can make money from selling Web Services. In part I, we'll look at the importance of developing a clear business model, and explore some potential revenue generating ideas. In part II we will go on to develop some models in more detail, and explore the potential for creating profitable businesses from Web Services. Wednesday August 15 2001 Internal or External Web Services? Which One Will Dominate? Web Services are clearly in the minds of most technical architects and developers, and as general issues about the use of uniform protocols and contracts are being settled, more specific questions arise. In this article, we will consider differences between internal and external Web Services, and attempt to suggest answers to questions, such as: What are the respective effects of implementing internal and external Web Services? And which type of Web Services will dominate in the future? Wednesday August 8 2001 Solving the Problem of Maintenance Every day, we hear of vendors announcing toolkits that serve to make the building of Web Services effortless. Organizations are, however, in different stages of the Web Services implementation phase - many organizations are awaiting other organizations’ reactions; a few have already announced availability of Web Services. Nevertheless, the majority of organizations, especially those with established products and a large customer base, are asking very specific questions about this new programming model. One of these questions is: How do we maintain different versions of Web Services for different customers? In this article, we will define the common problem of versioning, and attempt to find some solutions with respect to Web Services. Wednesday August 1 2001 Business Architecture for a Web Services Brokerage Understanding the Business Context of Web Services SOAP and Web Services may hold center stage of the developing Web industry, as attention focuses on toolkits and multi-platforms; however, this area of the industry is merely the tip of an iceberg, which reaches much further than merely selling utility software. Yet, rather than considering the overall architecture of a Web Services business model, the present trend seems to be for companies to produce development tools for the sake of it, in a market that is still maturing. Wednesday July 25 2001 Part II – ebXML and Web Services The Way to Do Business In part I of our series of articles on ebXML (electronic business XML), we introduced ebXML and the steps that an organization needs to take in order to start doing electronic business based on ebXML. In this article, we will look at how ebXML enables us to implement Web Services protocols, such as WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Wednesday July 18 2001 Web Services and the Insurance Business Is the Internet Finally Fulfilling its Promise? One of the major promises of the Internet is to change the way business is done in a dramatic way. If this promise were to be fulfilled, the Internet would allow companies to integrate their businesses seamlessly. Further, these companies would have more information that could be retrieved at a much higher speed than before, which would serve to create possibilities for improving profits.
Wednesday July 11 2001 Collaborative Electronic Business is here to stay Every day we hear of businesses announcing partnerships with each other in order to provide more dynamic applications. As the number of these applications increase, electronic businesses are faced with the fundamental problems of making sure that their applications are not only dynamic but maintain a high degree of inter-operability between their applications and the businesses with which they collaborate.
Wednesday July 4 2001 Caught in the .NET Microsoft has arguably the most coherent and finely tuned Web Services strategy of any of the large technology companies. In this article, I'll explain what I think Microsoft is doing, why they're doing it, and how they intend to pull it off. Wednesday June 27 2001 Web Services and Collaborative Commerce Collaborate or Die Collaborative Commerce (C-Commerce) is the name given to commercial relationships carried out over a collaborative framework to integrate enterprises’ business processes, share customer relationships and manage knowledge across enterprise boundaries. The ultimate aims of C-Commerce initiatives are to maximize return on intellectual capital investment, business agility and the quality of the customer experience. C-Commerce is far more crucial than basic B2B e-commerce that is designed to construct a virtual link for a pre-defined community of trading partners to buy or sell goods and services. Even after the fall of the dot-com era, corporate strategists and venture capitalists are embracing C-Commerce as the next generation of e-commerce and an evolution of the traditional supply chain process. Wednesday June 27 2001 Practical Considerations in Implementing Web Services Fighting vendor lock-in with Java standards Web Services are the new Holy Grail of programming. There has been lot of activity recently from different application server vendors who have announced widespread support for Web Services in their products. Those who have not yet announced support will surely do so in the near future. This article attempts to take a look at existing issues in implementing Web Services into your application. We shall not go into the details of what Web Services are or how to go about writing them. Instead what we shall attempt to discover are the issues that could arise in implementing applications which incorporate Web Services. The article concentrates particularly on Java enterprise applications, but there are more broadly applicable lessons here.
Wednesday June 20 2001 Has UDDI Created a Competitive Edge? Not Yet... IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc. launched Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) directory on May 2, 2001. The UDDI directory can be seen as a Yellow Pages-style business-to-business directory, allowing companies to locate suppliers and business partners, and then to hook up with them via the web. That is the idea at least. Each of the players views the project as a significant step in helping companies experience business efficiencies through Web Services, a new method for automating business processes using the Internet. Yet there is nothing automatic about connecting with any of the 500 or so companies registered in the directory, as you must physically contact them to get the desired software information. Wednesday June 20 2001 June 4-8 2001, San Francisco Web Services had a strong presence in the recent JavaOne conference in San Francisco, both in terms of companies promoting their efforts and the sessions on this topic. There was a great deal of interest in the subject and a mere mention of Web Services attracted hordes of people wanting to know more, wanting to tell you their angle on things, and wanting to get involved. Many people mentioned that their company is dabbling with it, which is encouraging, though few said that it was planned for commercial use in the near future.
Wednesday June 13 2001 Powering Web Services Through Metadata How RDF could help Web Services standards One of the most important requirements for highly automated Web Services is a rich description mechanism. In order to narrow down the negotiation and discovery of services that fit a particular contractual and technical profile, this information needs to be made available in an accessible way for machine processing. There have been several initiatives to develop systems for encoding and querying such Web Service descriptions, among them the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). Wednesday June 6 2001 Security Implications of Web Services Web Services need all the security features of any web-based operation, and more While Web Services promise advantages for developers and users, security implications definitely require consideration. Of course, this would be true of any web-based operation with server-side functionality. However, Web Services include several new aspects, such as B2B orientation, which deserve special scrutiny. Friday May 25 2001 Microsoft and the future of user-centric Web Services Web Services and the SOAP protocol are new trends, and the applications based on these technologies lack maturity. Few, if any, deal in any significant way with security (which is absent from the SOAP specification) or user identification. Try a search for Web Services applications, and you'll most like find only the simplest of implementations - GetTemp, ConvertMeterToFeet, etc. Friday May 25 2001 Why Open Source Developers Should Care about Web Services Changing the software distribution paradigm again Web Services have the potential to be a radically disruptive technology, both for traditional proprietary software makers and Open Source hackers. To understand why Web Services are important, we must look at how hardware platforms are changing. There seems to be movement away from traditional PCs to single purpose specialized devices that can run multiple applications, the Sony Playstation and the Palm Pilot are examples of this kind of device. More importantly, both of these devices and others like them have network capabilities. Since nobody likes the administrative overhead of installing and maintaining locally hosted applications, the idea of renting software becomes particularly appealing to both businesses and casual home computer users. Friday May 25 2001 What Are Web Services? Today, the two most popular technologies used on the Internet are e-mail and the World Wide Web. Over the next few years, we're likely to see another Internet technology become very important: "Web Services". Friday May 25 2001 Dynamic e-Business This article describes the principles and technologies underlying Web Services, why IBM believes Web Services provide value for e-business, and what IBM is doing to help companies leverage Web Services in their e-business solutions. Wednesday May 16 2001 Tracing the ancestry of Web Services Web Services, while they may feel like a completely new way of doing things, have a certain feeling of inevitability about them - a sense that they are an evolution not a revolution. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the historical imperatives that are driving us towards Web Services, and perhaps explain why the time is right for this technological development. |
