In recent years, few technological concepts have generated as much excitement
as XML and Web services. After the initial excitement and onslaught of
developers creating "Hello World" applications and (unfortunately) posting
them to a multitude of UDDI directories, there was a general eagerness to
apply this skill to real business problems (and we're not talking about
online Celsius-to-Fahrenheit calculators).
What better way to finally solve a piece of the remote messaging puzzle that
had eluded us than to use this seemingly straightforward,
platform-independent concept called Web services? While DCOM and CORBA
resolved some of the logistics surrounding distributed applications, the
actual solutions could be painfully difficult to implement in the real world,
or unsuitable to a multiplatform environment.
One of the first Web services infrastructures we designed for ... (more)
UDDI has been around for almost three years now. It has gone from an initial
proposal by three companies (Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft), to a consortium
effort (www.uddi.org) with a community of hundreds, and finally into the
hands of the OASIS standards body. Along the way, the original specification
has gone through two additional revisions. Perhaps more important, with each
new revision the business value of UDDI has shifted from being a registry of
public services to a central fixture in private EAI and partner-integration
efforts.
The most recent version of UDDI, V3, continues... (more)
Traditional development produces applications that are closed to wide usage.
Custom development is required to open these programs to wide-scale
integration. In contrast, Web services applications are by default open to
other systems and additional configuration is required to block access.
The Challenge of Web Services Security
A growing share of the Internet marketplace is being turned over to Web
services. Studies have shown that by the year 2006 a full 25% of all network
traffic will make use of XML-based Web services. As with every new
technology, the increased convenience co... (more)
Business has long pursued the goal of making IT more of a strategic tool and
less of a necessary evil. Organizations are constantly looking for easier,
cheaper, and more logical ways to build applications and unite the silos of
functionality they still depend on. One approach that has met with some
success is the concept of just-in-time integration - a technique to combine
new functionalities as quickly and cheaply as required, whether they reside
inside an organization or outside of it (i.e., with a business partner).
From the architectural perspective, just-in-time integration ... (more)
Traditional development produces applications that are closed to wide usage.
Custom development is required to open these programs to wide-scale
integration. In contrast, Web services applications are by default open to
other systems and additional configuration is required to block access.
The Challenge of Web Services Security
A growing share of the Internet marketplace is being turned over to Web
services. Studies have shown that by the year 2006 a full 25% of all network
traffic will make use of XML-based Web services. As with every new
technology, the increased convenience co... (more)