Vectors to the Holy Grail
An Excerpt
[From Loosely Coupled—The Missing Pieces of Web Services, by Doug Kaye]
Now at the start of the 21st century, web services are poised as the next technology to change the way we link businesses. It seems as though web services have appeared suddenly, just as the transcontinental telegraph appeared to have been instantly created at the moment its eastern and western wires were joined. But web services haven’t burst onto the scene any more quickly than FAX or email. Like the telegraph, web services are the result of many decades of invention.
Twelve vectors—a collection of both successes and failures—have converged at this one point in time and space to bring life to web services as illustrated in the figure below.
There’s long been a search for the Holy Grail
of data communications: that perfect technology for
linking all systems, large and small, wired and wireless.
Ask any CIO or CTO what he or she wants in this regard,
and you’ll probably hear something like this:
- to link to any organization, anywhere in the world, but with only a single connection to the network;
- to communicate with all business partners using
just one universal set of protocols, documents, and
business processes;
- to communicate securely, reliably, and without concern
for scalability (i.e., the volume of usage);
- to use the same technology to communicate within
the organization as is used externally;
- to loosely couple organizations so that they don’t
need to know the internals of one another’s business
processes or technologies;
- to be able to reuse data and processes in order
to reduce costs;
- to be able to change components or swap out one
for another without breaking anything; and
- to make money by providing data and services to
others over the network.
It’s a long list, but it isn’t new. Look at the list again, but this time, consider how each objective applies to the FAX machine. Then read it once more with the telegraph in mind. You’ll have to bend a few definitions here and there—they didn’t use the term business processes in the days of the Pony Express—but the concepts haven’t changed. The list has been fulfilled by every successful generation of data-communications technology. The list remains the same as the technologies continue to improve.
For example, there’s always been a data communications network, even if it was based on a relay of riders on horseback. Likewise, it’s always been important to have a single connection to the network, in whatever form it might be. Western Union made certain you could walk into one office and reach someone located near any other office. Today, with one FAX machine connected to one telephone line, you can reach any other FAX machine in the world.
What CIOs, CTOs, and those with other titles decades
before them have tried to do hasn’t changed. The
objective remains the efficient linking of organizations.
What’s new is that web services are the first technology
that promises to achieve this objective in the 21st
century, by directly linking our computer systems via
the public Internet.
Why was this objective so elusive? What were the missing
pieces? Was the Internet the only catalyst we’ve
needed to discover this Holy Grail of computer-to-computer
communications? If so, then why haven’t we been
doing this since the mid 1990s when the Internet first
got our attention? What have we been waiting for? If
not the Internet, was it the invention of XML, the eXtensible
Markup Language, that’s been universally adopted
as the basis for web services? Is that the missing piece?
Why now? And why all the hype?
Like the splicing together of the eastern and western wires to instantly create the transcontinental telegraph, the arrival of web services was preordained by the convergence of a number of technological developments and economic and political events. We’d been trying to create the equivalent of web services for many years, but it wasn’t until all the planets came into alignment that web services sud-denly appeared—as if out of nowhere.
[Continued in Loosely Coupled—The Missing Pieces of Web Services.]
Doug Kaye, 03 March 2003