Web Services Strategies
Beyond the technology, IT strategies for implementation of Web services by Doug Kaye.
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Anne Thomas Manes on Web Services Protocols. This month-old interview in InfoWorld gives a valuable perspective on the realities of the state-of-the-art in web services. Anne championed SOAP within Sun before becoming CTO of Systinet. Some of my favorite comments include:
- Re Liberty: "I hope at some point it actually will conform to Liberty Project, if Liberty ever actually produces some specifications."
- Re asynchronous services: "Most of the SOAP implementations that are out there only support a blocking API, which means you issue a request and your application just sits and waits for a response to come back." [Non-blocking APIs and message queuing aren't quite the same, but they're both required for asynchronous web services.]
- Re workflow standards: "Right now there are two specs that are floating around. One's from Microsoft, called [XLANG], and one's from IBM, called WSFL [Web Services Flow Language]. As far as I know, no one else in the world has rights to use either of those specs because they're owned by their respective companies. There's certainly been no effort, in any kind of an open forum, in any case, to coordinate that activity and stuff."
- Re SOAP and WSDL: "Neither SOAP 1.1 nor WSDL 1.1 are sanctioned by any kind of standards body in any way. They just happened to be published and accepted and have enormous acceptance. But they are not perfect specifications. There are big holes in both of those specs that makes interoperability somewhat challenging, because a lot of things are left as exercises to the implementer."
- Re service-oriented architectures (SOAs): "You no longer have this nice visual approach to designing your application. You now have to break the presentation away from the actual business logic and design the business logic so that it's completely independent from the type of user interface...Your average VB programmer has no clue how to do that hard stuff, and that's the biggest impediment right now."
Has anyone else noticed the extent to which InfoWorld has become "Web Services World?" I may not agree with everything they publish, but the committment and volume are impressive.
Posted Tuesday, April 23, 2002 1:17:53 PM 
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Top 10 Web Services Tips. Thomas Power has pulled together this top-ten list at Ecademy.com. For maximum benefit, read them a second time and extrapolate. The value of Thomas' tips are in the inferences you'll draw from the additional perspective. "Remember the result is likely to be superior to what you do today. If not, don't do it...But as always, for the brave there are great opportunities."
Posted Tuesday, April 23, 2002 12:16:08 PM
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UDDI in eWeek. Confused about the realities of UDDI directories? You're not alone. Here are three articles in eWeek that I found helpful.
- Web Directories Dial In, by Anne Chen, is a good overview. "Gartner estimates that, through 2005, more than 75 percent of Web services located through UDDI will be services privately generated by known partners with pre-existing agreements."
- UDDI 2.0 Provides Ties That Bind is a sidebar that explains what's been added to this most-recent version of UDDI. (The specs for UDDI 3.0 should be finalized later this year.)
- In Directories Ready for Testing, Timothy Dyck compares two commercially available implementations of UDDI 2.0 from Systinet and IBM.
Posted Tuesday, April 23, 2002 11:15:37 AM
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Microsoft: Web Services are Hype. This is a temporarily free story from ComputerWire. If you can read it before it goes away, you'll enjoy the ironies of the early-adopter trap.
Microsoft Corp has blamed industry hype for unleashing a potential backlash from customers angry that web services have been oversold.
Early adopters include Bank One Corp, Monster.com and partners such as McAffee.com who have committed to .NET My Alerts as a means to notify consumers of important information. .NET My Alerts is part of Microsoft's 14 .NET My Services...Bank One's $30m deal was to have seen customers notified of relevant financial information, such as account activity.
[Source: Scott Loftensess/Glenbrook Partners]
Posted Tuesday, April 23, 2002 10:31:42 AM
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