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If
you are a technocrat always looking for new trends in web development,
you must have already heard of web services. Here, in this article
we discuss about the standards in web services and the possibilities
of web services to become the future of web development. Feel free
to contact the author by mail to
Introduction
One interesting thing happening in the corporate
world after the dot-com fall is, the change in the fundamental ways
in which they operate and interact. There were many changes and
one revolutionary change is based on a new model called Web Services.
Web services help companies of any type to create, use and sell
applications between them by adopting certain standards and so,
the cost of B2B integration. Of course, Web services will not do
any magic by eliminating the integration challenges, But it can
open the possibility of new business opportunities, as the companies
can, just not only create Web services, but also can sell.
The big Industry players like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc., are already
extending their support to web services and coming up with new platforms
to develop and deploy web services.
What are
web services?
According to IBM, "Web services are
self contained, self describing, modular applications that can be
published, located, and invoked across the web. Web services perform
functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated
business processes".
We can say Web services are another form of web applications, with
self describing nature. When users request for a web application,
it can serve them and can also connect with the other related web
applications, and so, the users get all the services they need without
knowing that they are served by different applications from different
locations.
From web sites to web services
Before starting, let me talk a few words
about the journey to web services from web sites. In the early days
of web, we had only non-interactive web sites, later interactive,
and back end driven web sites. Businesses started using web sites
to get a global presence. Back end driven web sites gave the concept
of web based applications. Then businesses realized web applications
with which they built extranets, for private usage and customer
support. And when ecommerce came, the web sites became the marketing
places for B2C and B2B for selling products and services. In this
stage many of the web applications can be utilized by companies
without buying it, when the concept of ASPs(Application Service
Providers) established. Now the ASP concept is emerging as Web services.
Developers community expects that the ASP integration headaches
can be minimized if web services standardize certain operations
and make them easy to use.
Now you can raise a question " Ain 't we do these with the
existing technologies already?". The answer is yes. The component
models are already in use to achieve functions similar to web services.
Presently exiting technologies like COM+, DCOM, RMI, CORBA are used
to develop reusable components that can be hosted remotely and used
in the web applications. But these components are giving tough time
to the developers on during integrating them, and the cost of development
is also high so far. Hence the world of web services established.
The Standards are Everything
Web services are nothing but applications
with programmatic interface using certain standards and Internet
- friendly protocols. Web services are developed by people not for
the use of other people but for other Web services. Since human
intervention is minimized in Web services development, standards
are the base and everything, to make them work. We will discuss
the standards XML, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL and others in the following
text.
In the following pages we will discuss the
standards involved in web services development and the web services
development in a netshell. [Next
Page]
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