Web services: The next small step in e-business evolution

Zatni Arbi , IT Observer, Jakarta

Perhaps three of the greatest products of the IT industry are confusion, confusion and confusion. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the industry, those of us who try to keep ourselves up- to-date in technology are constantly bombarded by new terminology that points to new technology -- or old terminology that is being reused to refer to a new technology.

A case in point is Web services. Two of the most influential IT vendors in the world today, Microsoft and IBM, have been talking about Web services for some time. Other technology suppliers, such as Borland and even Sun Microsystems, have also joined in the Web service bandwagon.

Microsoft says that Web services are what its .NET infrastructure is all about. In fact, it has just signed an agreement with HP to offer .NET services in about two years. IBM says that Web services are the next step in the e-business evolution, and it is the underpinning of what they would call dynamic e-business. To us laymen, Web services may simply mean services that are available on the Internet -- including dating and term paper-writing services. What a confusing situation!

Interestingly, however, the most current use of the term "Web services" happens to be the result of cooperation between Microsoft and IBM and a number of other players. Essentially, it is the result of their joint attempt to enable a software application to connect, or "bind", to another software application automatically on the Web infrastructure.

The fact of life is that e-business systems may have been developed using different languages and may be running on different platforms. So, in order to make e-businesses more open to each other, interoperability became a key success factor.

There have been many attempts at creating a lingua franca for applications that run on the Web, and one that has gained support from a lot of technology vendors is Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP.

First developed in 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), IBM, Microsoft and Lotus, SOAP constitutes an additional layer that is independent of the application platform but allows them to interoperate. SOAP uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a language that enables applications to exchange data over the Internet.

The key components of Web services make up a triangle, with a brokerage house in one corner, Web service providers in another and the requester in the third.

The brokerage house maintains and updates its repository of Web services that are available from service providers who have registered with it. The registry may be implemented using IBM's WebSphere or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. It does not matter which of these tools is used, as both have been specifically designed to talk to each other using common standards, including Java and XML.

At another corner of the triangle are the e-business companies, which offer goods and services. These may be a trading desk of the stock exchanges, a supplier of stationery, an airline reservation system and so on. At the third corner of the triangle are the requesters, the prospective clients who want to find out whether the goods or services they need are being offered by the service providers.

The service providers publish their services with the brokerage house using a standard specification called Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The repository uses Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).

A requester, for example a printing company that needs a fresh supply of printing paper, may publish a request on the Web. It basically shouts, "Hey, we need a large quantity of recycled, unbleached paper. Here are our specifications, and here is the price range that we are willing to pay!" The brokerage house then checks its repository, and if it finds one or more suppliers that offer this kind of product, it will then connect the requester to them. The applications from both ends, which may be implemented using different platforms, will then communicate using SOAP.

Understandably, some people call the three steps in Web services "publish, find and bind". It is not the businesses themselves that do all of these activities, it is their applications that perform these activities on their behalf. These applications publish to the Web, find the suitable services and then bind with each other to initiate and complete the transactions.

The main benefit that the Web service environment offers is the ability of e-businesses to respond to new opportunity more quickly. "They do not have to rebuild the applications from scratch to work with the Web services, they can just recompose existing ones to enable this to happen," explained Ayu Bisono, IBM Indonesia's Software Country Manager in a recent interview.

It was not very long ago that we heard people talk about the e-marketplace as the ultimate stage in e-business -- particularly in the area of Business-to-Business (B2B). Today, Web services are being touted as the future of e-business. While Web services represent a small evolutionary step in the development of e- business, it shows us that we may be in for a never-ending evolution.