Time to plan your Web services
Tim Landgrave
Published: 08 Aug 2002 14:05 BST
2003 will be the "Year of the Web services," as major Internet sites start to expose data as Web services, software developers shore up Web services tools, and standards committees turn up the heat. It's time to begin planning how to implement early technology tests starting next year. The first step is evaluating key events and ramifications and then laying a road map to begin the planning process.
Early Internet adoption begins
So far, the hype of Web services has significantly overshadowed the reality. The original vision was for Web services to allow companies to create huge "objects in the sky" that companies could integrate into their core business processes -- Distributor A could use the inventory system for Manufacturer B by connecting to that exposed system using Web services standards.
As companies began exploring this model, the security and reliability issues became more difficult and expensive to overcome than the benefits were worth. So Web services moved inside the firewall where companies could control security and reliability issues and get the benefits of Web services as an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tool.
But a couple of visible Internet companies have begun testing the "object in the sky" model again -- notably Amazon and Google. Last April, Amazon released a non-SOAP implementation of a catalog Web service. It allowed queries of the entire Amazon catalog with results returned in an XML file. In mid-July, it released version 1.0 of its XML query interface that is now SOAP compliant.
I've already begun to see creative uses of the interface. For example, many technical sites now include a list of books that cover the topic being discussed on a particular page of their site along with, of course, links to Amazon where they can buy the book.
And Amazon isn't the only major company implementing a public SOAP interface. The top online search site, Google.com, has also implemented a SOAP interface to its search engine. Now you can place context-sensitive search links on a Web page based on content entered by a user or keywords lifted from the Web page. The Google SOAP interface makes it trivial to add advanced Internet search functions to any Web page.
New tools continue to emerge
The Linux community will get a real boost from Borland's release of its Kylix version 3.0. It's now fully compliant with SOAP standards, allowing it to easily create or consume Web services hosted on the Linux operating system. Perhaps even more importantly, Kylix 3.0 adds support for C++ in addition to its native Delphi support. I believe that C++ development on Linux will benefit significantly from having a commercial sponsor behind it.
Kylix allows developers to create Web services using Linux and Apache that will adhere to published SOAP specifications. It also includes utilities that give Apache some application server capabilities, as well as database middleware to make it easier for Linux developers to access back-end databases. Kylix fills a large niche between the homegrown, downloaded development environment and the high-end WebSphere/Linux environment from IBM. It also demonstrates that momentum is building around Linux as a viable platform to build and deploy Web services.
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