Imagine keeping your company’s inventory well stocked without having to call, fax or e-mail orders to the manufacturers that replenish your supplies. Or imagine using a standard messaging system with all of your business partners, eliminating the need for extra staff to sort and process multiple forms. Imagine if, when you made airline reservations, the online form you filled out “remembered” your preferences and key information based on information you’d submitted during past visits, and instantly provided you with a detailed map of your destination.
These are some of the possibilities described by Mark Colan, Web Services and XML Chief Advocate for IBM, at the first “Tech a.m.” meeting held by the Rhode Island Technology Council (RItech) on Wednesday, June 13 at the Providence Marriott.
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Talking to about 60 tech professionals and business leaders, Colan, who worked for Lotus for 12 years, spoke about “XML: Where We’re Coming From; Web Services: Where We’re Going.”
According to Colan, Web services is a new model for using the Web, wherein electronic transactions are initiated automatically by a program, and not necessarily by a Web browser. Web services are built on XML (the common term for “extensive markup language,” which enables Internet programs to automatically exchange information, even if their formats are incompatible) and other Internet standards, and are less dependent on the manual actions of humans (such as filling out detailed forms) to send and retrieve information or services.
The IBM definition of Web services is that of an interface that describes a collection of operations that are network accessible through standardized XML messaging. Although XML is standardized, the specifications for Web services are not. And the definition of Web services is being kept pretty general, because its meaning and capabilities are expected to evolve.
According to Colan, Web services are currently seen as being most useful for business to business (B2B) applications. The idea is that information would be exchanged between computer programs, transformed into a presentable form — such as a Web page, printable form, or even a cell phone interface. Examples Colan gave of the type of information that could be exchanged include airline reservations, credit card validations, and rental car agreements, supply chain management, and purchase orders.
The computer industry uses the term SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for the XML protocol developed and refined by Microsoft, IBM, Lotus and others. According to Colan, this protocol is “completely vendor-neutral,” meaning it is independent of programming language, an object model, operating system or platform. (SOAP was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium, or WC3, last year for consideration as the standard XML protocol). SOAP, Colan said, “looks a lot like UNIX RPC around 1980” — in other words, it is not unfamiliar to developers. And for those concerned with security, SOAP may be used to encrypt messages or create digital signatures.
Other topics Colan covered included WSDL (Web Service Description Language), which he described as an XML vocabulary containing operational information about the Web service interface, implementation details, access protocol and contact endpoints. WSDL, though not yet a standard in the industry, could speed the implementation of Web service transactions, especially if a code generator were developed to read WSDL documents and generate code for service requests.
Colan also touched upon UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), that he compared to “global electronic yellow pages.” It would work as a registry for e-business services, publishing the availability of such services in a networked “phone book.” Businesses or clients could electronically search for specific services and be put in touch with a service provider nearly instantly.
SOAP, WSDL and UDDI are useful for an application or data integration strategy, offering flexibility for the inevitable evolution of software, Colan concluded. In closing, he said that Web services leverage an existing software system, build on existing standards, and don’t require a new programming language. IBM’s long-term vision for Web services is to create legal templates that can be exchanged between businesses, and to provide the capability of automatic terms negotiation — integrated between parties in minutes, or even seconds.
So how long before Web services such as the ones Colan described become commonplace?
“We (IBM) have many customers who are already starting to develop Web services applications, with some going live this summer. Most of the uses we see are for direct communication between business programs within a company, or between partner companies. Such uses typically do not involve a browser for access; I refer to these as ‘Enterprise Application Integration’ or ‘B2B’ systems, he said.
Web services will also be used to build browser-based (Business-to-Consumer, or B2C) applications, but it represents ‘plumbing’ that the user will not typically be aware of, in any visible sense. The main difference is that the power of Web services will allow for greater capabilities in browser-based applications.”
Colan said that as software becomes more able to support Web services, and as developers learn the new technologies associated with it, Web services will become more widely used — within one to three years, he predicts.
In the future, Web site visitors may be using Web services without even realizing it, Colan said. The sites could have Web services incorporated into their pages, while the viewer would only take notice of them as an added feature.
Some Web service tools
According to Colan, IBM is releasing new versions of all of its software products
to add Web services features. WebSphere Application Server, which is a complete
platform for deploying any kind of Web-based application, will be the first. In
addition, IBM will support Web services “everywhere else” — in its DB2 Universal
Database, MQ Series Integrator system, development tools, and Lotus applications.
These products will be rolled out over the next year, he said
According to its Web site, Microsoft is developing a platform, Microsoft .NET, for creating and using XML-based Web services. The idea behind .NET, announced last summer, is that rather than writing software that runs on Windows, programmers will write Internet software that runs on .NET. Like Windows, .NET will provide the basic blocks from which more complex software can be constructed. However, instead of running software on a single machine, as with PC software, .NET software would involve many machines interacting via an Internet connection, providing services to one another. Ultimately, Microsoft aims to use .NET to provide a framework for machines to offer Web services, establishing a new standard as it did with Windows.
According to its Web site, Sun Microsystems is developing Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE), which the company’s Web site describes as “smart, open Web services” that will utilize Sun’s iPlanet software, its Solaris Operating Environment, Open Net Environment Webtop, developer release, Forte tools, Java platform, and XML standards. Unlike Microsoft’s .NET initiative, Open Net would be platform-independent, with Sun offering service providers with “highly reliable, highly scalable, platform-independent solutions.”
