The Essential Guide to Web Services

The technology is drawing such huge hype because it promises to makeit easier for companies to integrate software and reuse software thatthey or others have already built, historically an expensive andtime-consuming process.

Why do Web services hold such promise? First, they run over theInternet, which pretty much every company is connected to, and overintranets or other Internet protocol-based networks, which are commoninside companies. Second, major technology vendors, including BEASystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBMIBM, MicrosoftMicrosoft, OracleOracle and Sun, have agreedto support a set of standard software technologies that spell out howdifferent computer systems should interact with each other - anunlikely level of cross-industry cooperation. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de

The Web services approach doesn't necessarily make earlier integrationtechnologies obsolete. But it makes types of integration possiblethat would have been hellishly complex otherwise. Bekins, for example,first considered using a different computing architecture called CORBAto tie its freight scheduling system to its partners' transportationmanagement systems. But Randy Mowen, Bekins' director of datamanagement and e-business architecture, says he found 50-odd standardsthat he'd have to follow, and a dearth of documentation. "We kind ofabandoned it before we got too far along," Mowen says. "It neverreally materialized because of the complexity."

How do Web services work?

In contrast with the more traditional means of integration that camebefore it, Web services offer a more flexible - or "looselycoupled" - way of linking applications. Think of Web services workinglike an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. If Mr. Smith wanted toask Miss Jones out for an ice cream soda, he didn't need a direct wirefrom his phone to hers; he went through the switchboard operator, whoplugged in the connection and then disconnected it when he and MissJones were done speaking. Mr. Smith could also use the same technologyto call Mr. Johnson at the bank. Likewise, if Mowen's programmerswrite a Web service that pulls information from Bekins' freightscheduling system, it can send that information to systems atsuppliers A, B and C; the code doesn't have to be rewritten for eachpartner.