Future Focus - Tomorrow's Insights for Today's Decision Makers 
 
Web Services - The Hype and the Hope - Part 1

May 2002

Aaron Kumove -- Managing Director, Horizon Consulting
Every few years the IT industry winds itself up about “the next big thing”, something so revolutionary, so all encompassing, that it promises to shift our paradigms yet one more time and wondrously transform our lives into a utopian paradise of magical ease.  And of course there are always an abundance of vendors with “shrink wrapped” products which will “out of the box” allow you to effortlessly take advantage of the many benefits that this new paradigm shift promise to deliver.  Welcome to today’s incarnation of “the next big thing” – Web Services.

Web Services are being touted today as a revolutionary new way to enable electronic trading and application and process integration over the Internet.  They are also said by some to have the valuable ability to turn monolithic legacy applications into discrete components, which can be accessed, on a discrete basis over the Internet. 
Pretty impressive, but is it true? 
What actually is a web service when one has a look at the specifications that exist today and the capabilities that they can deliver?

A web service is a “an emerging “standard” mechanism based on XML for interoperability between heterogeneous operating systems, languages, applications and business partners comprised of three component specifications.  They are:

  • SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
  • WSDL – Web Services Description Language
  • UDDI – Universal Description Discovery and Integration
Great, more alphabet soup . . . what does it mean?

The idea behind Web services is as follows. 
A software developer wishes to expose (sell?) some functionality as a “web service” which can be consumed by other applications over the Internet.  Regardless of the language that the code is written in it can be described using WSDL, which defines the interfaces in a language neutral manner using XML.  This is not a new concept.  CORBA (Common Object Request Broker) pioneered a concept called IDL (Interface Definition Language) which had the same goals. 

Having described how the functionality can be accessed in a language neutral manner the Web Service is then listed in a repository as defined by UDDI.  Think of this as a “yellow pages” for Web Services. 

The idea then is that an organisation in need of a particular piece of functionality can peruse the UDDI repository, find a Web Service that fulfils its needs and then invoke that Web Service directly using SOAP. 

That is all there is to Web Services as it stands today. 
In theory Web Services should provide a “standard” mechanism to ensure that one application can call services of another without having to worry about differences in languages, operating systems or organisational domains.  The proponents of Web Services (every vendor under the sun,) claim that this will usher in an era of unprecedented ease in collaborative electronic commerce.  Are they right?

History might be very instructive if one goes back to the growth of the railroads in the 1800’s.  The factor that probably was most responsible for the rise of rail as a ubiquitous mode of transport was standardisation of track gauges.   Before standardisation trains from one company could not travel on tracks built by another.  After track gauges were standardised rail transport became the dominant mode of transport across continents. 

In many ways the Web Services concept is about standardising the track gauges of the  electronic railroads that are being built today, enabling software to interoperate regardless of who built it using which technology.  The theory is that as long as we all agree to define the software to each other in a “standard” way (WSDL), and agree on a common way to invoke software services (SOAP), then our interoperability problems are a thing of the past. 
The Java camp can continue to develop in Java, the Microsoft camp can embrace .NET and the mainframe developers can continue with COBOL, and in theory they can all talk to each other effortlessly.  Utopia!

Like standardisation of rail track gauges in the 1800’s, Web Services are a low level means to bridge infrastructural domains.  As important and worthy this goal is, it is far from the complete picture needed to enable collaborative electronic processing. 

Next month we will look at some of the limitations in the Web Services model and expose some of the hype surrounding this “next big thing”. 

 

Aaron Kumove -- Managing Director, Horizon Consulting
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