Toufic Boubez

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)

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)

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)

Policy-It's More Than Just Security - From just-in-time integration to Web services

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)

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)