The Road to the Future of Web Services

Finding the right strategies and standards to pave the way to business webs

By Mark Davydov

These Web services operate across company boundaries on the Internet and involve digitizing (capturing and exposing) business processes, best practices, and data by using XML. This realization implies that any company, which owns or has access to valuable material that others are unable to offer at a lower price, puts itself into a position to be a Web-service provider. Two key trends have contributed to that evolution:

• The shift away from mainly product-dominated to service-oriented industries and markets
• The shift away from proprietary business processes to "core competencies" delivered over the Internet using direct B2B relationships or application service provider models.

Many leading economists, pundits, and industry-watchers predict the business-web future of e-business: Fueled by a new, XML- and Web-based, service-oriented computing infrastructure, business webs will help transform the entire Internet universe from a predetermined collection of tightly coupled, technology-bound, static B2B relationships to a world of spontaneous, "plug-and-play," all-inclusive marketplaces. Web services are the next step in the evolution of the Internet where programmable elements and components, placed on Web sites by companies for others to access distributed services, represent the basis for the new computing infrastructure - ultimately leading to the realization of global e-business.

Unfortunately, a huge gap exists between the business-web vision and reality. Rapid and effective deployment of Web services is a problem for most organizations, which must confront an infinite number of issues. The sheer disparate, heterogeneous nature of computing resources made accessible over the Web and the unavailability of global interoperability standards has obscured virtually every aspect of the realization of Web services. Moreover, companies have an urgent need for mechanisms that can provide information in real time about each participant capable of engaging in B2B relationships, including specifics of supported business processes, such as the semantics of business data transactions and associated data interchanges, operational conventions, and so on.

Business-Web Pioneers

Recently, major IT vendors and leaders in financial services, manufacturing, and other industries announced Web services strategies. At the center stage are new developments in essential enabling technologies for Web services - collaborative distributed computing platforms and, more important, XML.

Until now, the Java Enterprise Edition Version 2 (J2EE) and Enterprise JavaBeans specifications were practically the only viable technology frameworks for Web-based collaborative distributed computing. Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, in his Comdex Fall 2000 keynote address, described the beta versions of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework, two key technologies for transforming the Web into a more distributed model of the business Internet that enables computers, devices, and services to collaborate.

The .NET Framework is at a very early stage in its lifecycle and many details are still being worked out by Microsoft developers. Enabling Web services will undoubtedly become the key priority for IT organizations, and because Microsoft platforms are widely used for distributed computing, users need time to prepare.

Web Services Over .NET

First off, the .NET Framework is a full-fledged variant of service-oriented software architectures realized by a range of specialized development tools and runtime environments specifically focused on enabling accelerated, component-based development. As of March 2001 it included:

• A new programming language for writing classes and components called C#
• A new middleware environment with a common language (CL) runtime environment, which runs bytecodes in an internal language (IL) format, and a set of base components accessible from the CL run time that provides various infrastructure functions (such as networking, containers, and so forth)
• New user interface facilities accessible from Visual Studio such as Win Forms and Web Forms
• New server-side facilities, such as a new version of Active Server Pages - ASP+ - that supports compilation of ASPs into the CL run time and a new version of Active Data Object (ADO) data access components (ADO+) that uses XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Second, the .Net Framework allows for flexible cross-language component interactions; for example, it supports Perl, Eiffel, Cobol, and other programming languages. Third, the .NET Framework allows scripting languages (such as VBScript and JScript) to be used as full-featured languages because they have been put into a compiled (versus interpretive) programming mode with the same base-class APIs as C# or C++.

Finally, and most important, one characteristic of the .NET Framework extends the entire concept of collaborative distributed computing and marks the shift in how distributed applications can be built. A majority of today's Web applications built with EJB or CORBA and DCOM technologies are, to a large extent, stateful applications (in other words, they hold state on the server) that limit application scalability and interoperability, especially dynamic binding across components. The .NET Framework is explicitly designed for a loosely connected, very distributed, and fully stateless world. It's built on the premise of XML data interchange (between remote data objects and layers of multitier applications) using SOAP messaging models. In a nutshell, XML and SOAP are deeply integrated into the framework, and this integration is instrumental for enabling Web services.

As mentioned previously, Microsoft's .NET strategy is one of several newly introduced foundational architectures for enabling Web services. One interesting implementation is Oracle's Oracle.Now platform. This is a significantly different implementation that takes a "suite-type" approach to deployment of e-business capabilities. Specifically, Oracle consolidated most of its infrastructure products into virtually a single package offering centered around the Oracle Internet Application Server 9i (see Table 1 for the similarities and differences between .NET and .NOW).