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A new generation of tools for delivering
useful features and functions to websites and other web-enabled software.
Web services fundamentally change the way in which people think about
creating new products that run on computers, for both consumers and business
users. Instead of having to create a new application from scratch with
complicated programming tools and methodologies,web services let people
simply sub scribe to live services created by other people which they can
then "plug in" to their new product. for example, a company that wanted to
add an instant messaging feature to its customer-support service might
simply subscribe to such a feature created by a third party without having
to write a single line of code. Similarly, a company with a useful financial
program could simply publish a web services-enabled version in a uddi directory and generate revenue from subscribers.
By far the most
important application of web services, though, is in the integration of
programs and data across corporate networks. Because they are based on
industry standards such as xml and soap, web services can theoretically help
programs that know nothing about each other communicate in any number of
ways. This solves one of business's oldest problems: how to make their
expensive software investments more useful. By allowing a stock-control
program to talk to an ordering system, for example, a retailer can manage
its business much more efficiently, even if the two programs have different
heritages or even run on different operating systems. Organisations
undergoing mergers or acquisitions can use web services to quickly integrate
their systems with those of their new partners, perhaps saving as much as
50% on the costs of integration, according to some estimates. Software
vendors can provide their applications online and use web services to
provide automatic, unsupervised upgrades and maintenance.
Despite their comparative youth, web services are already cropping
up in all sorts of companies. Inevitably , there are arguments about exactly
what a web service is and how it should be used, and some are concerned that
the principal benefit, compatibility, is already being lost as people fight
for their own piece of turf. For once, though, the industry's bigger players
seem in board agreement on how to make web services work. Microsoft in
particular has entered the fray with its .net strategy. Its earliest endeavours are centred on its Passport system,
which millions of people use
to login and authenticate themselves to websites such as Hotmail 0and
Expedia, although it plans a core set of "foundation" services including
instant messaging, e-mail, calendars, personal alerts and data storage. More
critically, it is creating a base upon which other developers and service
providers can build. Early adopters of the .net program included ebay, which
hopes to provide subsets of its online auction technology as web services.
Predictably, there are worries that are Microsoft's ability to disseminate
hundreds of millions of copies of .net-enabled software with the next
version of its windows and Offices products will give it an unbreakable hold
on the web-services business. But other companies, notably sun Microsystems
and ibm, are taking web services equally seriously and are doing plenty of
business. |
