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 is a cornerstone
of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under SOA, applications consist of
aggregations of calls to services. Services are simply coarsely grained
functions that are made availa... (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 ov... (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 ov... (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 ... (more)
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-Fa... (more)