Toufic Boubez

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 available to invoking applications using a consistent semantic. They might encapsulate a well-defined un... (more)

Beyond XML Firewalling

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)

WS Track - The Role of Policy in Web Services Integration - It's More Than Just Security

Too often today the preferences, terms, and conditions describing how a Web service behaves when discovered and invoked is programmed right into the business logic. Hard-coding this behavior logic however introduces cost, complexity, and rigidity into a Web services architecture. A better approach is to abstract a Web services "usage policy" out of code where this metadata can be managed as need be. This session introduces the concept of Web Services Policy and describes how the construct can be used to implement a more customized and versatile Web service infrastructure. Beyond... (more)

Bringing Order to Enterprise Service Proliferation

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)

Web Services Security

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 W... (more)