Tech Sizzlers: Seamless Connectivity

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The W3C defines Web service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.

Used primarily as a means for businesses to communicate with each other and with clients, Web services allow organizations to communicate data without intimate knowledge of each other's IT systems behind the firewall.

The Webopedia describes the term as a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol backbone.

XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, WSDL is used to describe the services available and UDDI is used for listing what services are available.

Web services technologies provide a language-neutral, environment-neutral programming model that accelerates application integration inside and outside the enterprise. Also, Interoperability is one of the significant benefits that Web Services offer.

A research agency named Radicati has reported that in 2004 the market for web services solutions, management, integration and security, reached $950 million, and will grow to nearly $6.2 billion by end of 2008.

Over the years, there have been a lot of debates over open standards and proprietary technologies promoted by the prominent players in the industry.

Sun Microsystems was the first to try and solve the problem of Web services through the Sun OpenNet environment way back in 2002. Microsoft also attempted this with the .Net by launching new versions every year but still compatibility issues existed.

In an attempt to ensure consistency in the development of Web services, IBM, Microsoft, and BEA Systems came together in 2002. Accenture, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP came together in 2003 to form Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to Speed Development and Deployment of Web Services; Provide Support and Road Map for Developers and Customers.

However, there still remained a certain inconsistency in the standards adopted and created a divide among the proprietary frameworks.

Upcoming Trends

More recently, RESTful Web services have been regaining popularity. These also meet the W3C definition, and are often better integrated with HTTP than SOAP-based services.

To improve interoperability of Web Services, the WS-I have been publishing profiles and is currently building on specifications generally referred to as WS-* to extend Web Services capabilities.

One of the most crucial specifications of WS-*, WS-Security, is a communications protocol providing a means for applying end-to-end security to Web services.

Originally developed by IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign, the protocol is now officially called WSS and developed via committee in Oasis-Open. In addition, OASIS has also standardized many Web service extensions, including Web Services Resource Framework and WSDM.



Active Participation

All the large players have been incorporating Web services features as part of their core offerings. Recently, IBM set up WS-Security for signing data to and from its IBM® WebSphere® Message Broker.

Sun has also introduced Project Glassfish that will replace the Java Web Services Developer Pack, its previous release vehicle for providing new web services.

Sun is also offering its cloud computing products and has announced that OpenSolaris will now work with the popular Amazon web services hosting, called Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2).

Microsoft also launched its new version of .NET 3.5 this year. Oracle is already working closely with W3C and is already a major participant in UDDI as well as SOAP efforts.

BEA Systems has also released three Web services specifications that have been issued as royalty-free specifications supporting asynchrony, reliable messaging, and general message data.

Going forward for the Web services protocols to be interoperable across diverse systems and suitable for serious applications, standards bodies, such as W3C, OASIS, and WS-I, must formally standardize these protocols.

The future trend is greatly swinging towards a single, unified programming model supporting different scenarios, in turn providing a developer experience that is consistent for service design, configuration and deployment.