The Road to the Future of Web Services

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

By Mark Davydov

Finding an XML Standard

The past several months have seen an extensive amount of work on providing practical implementations and technical specifications to enable the development of open, interoperable e-business interactions. This work focuses around utilizing the World Wide Web Consortium XML syntax and the Internet as the underpinning technologies. However, you should be aware that, nowadays, any reference to XML creates an "assumption" that it was already adopted as the official standard. Unfortunately, many critical elements, especially XML-based business vocabularies for the majority of industries, are not set in stone (such as message and document descriptions).

Currently, more than 70 critical XML standards are waiting to be released. The "real stars" of the XML standardization, however, are two "competing" or "converging" (depending on the originators' spin) XML proposals for Web services - e-business XML (ebXML) and universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI). Both of these proposals deal with the subject of so-called service-binding XML APIs.

World Wide ebXML

The ebXML standard proposal is the result of a joint international initiative of the United Nations' Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. The main goal of ebXML is to define the technical architecture for the Global Commerce Internet Protocol, a set of XML-based recommendations governing the management of data for Internet communication and the majority of B2B interactions. In this context, the primary objective of ebXML is to lower the barrier of entry to e-business in order to facilitate trade, particularly with respect to small- and medium-sized enterprises and developing nations.

At the time of this writing, this initiative included more than 40 major manufacturers and retailers and eight trade associations, which in total represent more than 850,000 companies around the world. Many leading e-marketplaces (exchanges), such as Transora and GlobalNetXchange, embrace ebXML and take active roles in associated development activities.

The technical architecture for ebXML is built around a key conceptual principle. It looks at e-business interactions from the standpoint of business workflow, selecting and including into the architecture the objects common to many business processes, such as trading partner profiles (location, services, business needs, and so forth). It uses XML to identify and define these objects with attributes (data) along with the functions that could be performed on those attributes.

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A cornerstone of the ebXML architecture is enabling the creation of consistent, robust, and interoperable Web services and associated components using two critical business-modeling constructs. First, it uses the business operational view, which addresses the semantics of business data transactions and associated data interchanges and includes operational conventions, agreements, and mutual obligations and requirements. These specifically apply to the business needs of trading partners. Second, it uses the functional service view, which addresses the supporting services and deployment needs of ebXML technologies.

The UDDI Phone Book

IBM, Ariba, and Microsoft started the UDDI initiative in September 2000, with a goal to create a standard framework for service-oriented B2B interactions and integrating business services using the concept of standard registry services. These services are organized to provide business functionality similar to an online phone book:

• "Yellow Pages" - categories of business served by each listed company
• "White Pages" - listings of companies, together with contact information and business identifier numbers
• "Green Pages" - service deployment requirements, such as information on how to do B2B interactions with each listed company, including business processes and data format information.

Overall, the UDDI focuses on providing businesses with a common mechanism to publish Web service information on the Internet using the XML- and SOAP-based Web Service Definition Language.

Web services are not a vision of the faraway future. The core technologies are underway in standards-based, industry-wide initiatives. The next step is for companies to figure out how to assemble and augment these new technologies in order to ease the IT evolution and ensure business success.

Mark M. Davydov, Ph.D. (mark.davydov@den.galileo.com or markdavydov@netscape.net), is a recognized industry expert in systems architecture, application integration, and advanced data management solutions. He is also author of Corporate Portals and E-Business Integration (McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2001).