As a developer (or potential developer) of Web services, sooner or later you are going to wonder just how you might be able to reduce the interoperability issues you see. If you work with Apache Axis or Apache SOAP 2.x, you will see this problem when sending a java.lang.Hashtable to a Microsoft technology-based Web service. Similarly, creators of Microsoft ASP.NET Web services express confusion when sending a System.Data.DataSet to a non-Microsoft endpoint. The bad news here is that the developer of the Web service may have actually thought they were creating an interoperable solution. In this look at building interoperable Web services, the following items will be covered: Interoperability efforts: Understand what work is being done to make your job as a developer easier Best practices: Understand what you can do as a Web service creator to make it easier to use ... (more)

Building Interactive Web Services with WSIA & WSRP

WSIA and WSRP are new Web services standards that enable businesses to create user- facing, visual, and interactive Web services that organizations can easily plug-and-play into their applications and portals. This article will familiarize you with these technologies and illustrate how they can help your businesses. One of the main promises of Web services is enabling the assembly of Web applications from functional components distributed across multiple locations. However, until now the assembly of visual, rich, interactive Web applications with a cohesive flow and look-and-feel has been a challenge. Custom programming is required to create a user interface tier for each new Web service, resulting in set-up and maintenance efforts that render business initiatives cost prohibitive as the number of components increases. Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA... (more)

VoiceXML 2.0 Is W3C Candidate Recommendation Cornerstone to the W3C Speech Interface Framework is Ready for Implementors

(February 11, 2003) - To bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published VoiceXML 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Advancement of a W3C Technical Report to Candidate Recommendation is an explicit, public call for implementation. Since 1999, W3C has been working on its Speech Interface Framework to expand access to the Web to allow people to interact via key pads, spoken commands, listening to prerecorded speech, synthetic speech, and music. With the number of telephone lines and mobile phones exceeding one billion units worldwide, the specifications of W3C's Speech Interface Framework will allow an unprecedented number of people to use any telephone to access appropriately designed Web-based services. VoiceXML 2.0 allows developers to create audio di... (more)

Message-Centric Web Services vs RPC-Style Web Services

Message-centric vs RPC-style Web services is a long-standing debate and bone of contention regarding the proper use of Web services technologies. Early renditions of SOAP and XML-RPC were all about providing RPC-style interactions...in fact, that's all that was supported, so there really wasn't much choice in the matter. RPC-style interfaces have their advantages: immediate gratification of request/response, and a programming model whereby remote procedures are exposed in a way that mimics the underlying object architecture of the applications concerned, allowing a developer to make "normal"-looking method calls in the native language. Are these benefits really worth it? Developers, system architects, standards bodies, and vendors alike have all come around to the idea that message-style interactions between Web services are an attractive alternative to RPC-style We... (more)

Managing the Impact of Change in an Enterprise Web Services Network

A growing number of organizations are adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to their IT infrastructure because they want to enhance their ability to change the enterprise application landscape cost effectively and rapidly, in support of changing business requirements. An SOA offers many potential benefits, but capturing the true value of an SOA is virtually impossible without the ability to manage the change inherent in Web service networks. The Nature of an Enterprise Service Network: Big, Dynamic and Rife with Interdependencies The result of an SOA approach is a rapidly expanding network of enterprise Web services. SOA breaks monolithic applications into a greater number of smaller, more focused application modules that are easily understood, modified, and linked to form and reform applications as the needs of the business change. By nature, th... (more)

Creating Web Services Using GLUE

GLUE, by The Mind Electric, is a framework for developing and publishing Web services. It is simple, easy, and fast to create Web services. GLUE supports SOAP1.2, WSDL1.1, and UDDI v2. It comes in two editions: GLUE standard is free, and GLUE Professional has more advanced features. The Mind Electric hosts a Yahoo group for developers to post questions and share knowledge. This article provides an introduction to how to use GLUE, including publishing and invoking Web services, working on SOAP messages, using SOAP over JMS, publishing EJBs as Web services, and publishing and inquiry using UDDI. A Simple Web Service Let's start by creating a simple Web service. Assume that we have an online bookstore service that provides searching for books by keywords. Here is the Java interface, which has one method that takes a string of keywords and returns a list of books matchi... (more)

Infrastructure-Level Web Services

When discussing Web services, most people tend to focus on the core Web services framework (the standards and protocols) and the applications that you can build with the framework. Although I have no trouble waxing profusely on these topics, I get even more jazzed when I start to think about infrastructure-level Web services. (I know. I need to get a life.) Infrastructure-level Web services are Web services that implement part of the distributed computing infrastructure. They help other Web services communicate. In particular, these services make the Web services framework more robust. They provide such functionality as: Security and provisioning Performance management Operational management Metering, billing, and payments Routing and orchestration Advertisement and discovery Caching and queuing State management and persistence John Hagel and John Seely Brown refer t... (more)

Enterprise Service Bus Products

Enterprises are demanding integration tools that enable more seamless interoperability across diverse integration-ware paradigms: old, current, and emerging. The industry has coined a new three-letter acronym - enterprise service bus (ESB) - that speaks to the dream of standards-based integration of legacy middleware with the new world of Web services. ESB denotes an emerging segment of the middleware market. ESB middleware vendors include Cape Clear Software, Fiorano Software, IBM, IONA, Sonic Software, Systinet, TIBCO Software, and webMethods. ESB products bring together the legacy world of vendor-proprietary, message-oriented middleware (MOM) protocols with the growing "WS-*" stack of vendor-independent Web services standards. Fundamentally, ESB is "MOM++." ESB products support reliable, guaranteed messaging, which has traditionally been the core MOM functionalit... (more)

IBM Alphaworks Announces Global Business Object

IBM alphaWorks has announced the release of Global Business Object.Global Business Object (GBO) is a technical preview that provides a set of libraries for constructing culturally-aware graphical controls. GBO encapsulates the functions into a reusable globalization tag library in a J2EE environment. Programmers can easily create global GUI functions in Java Server Pages (JSP) files by simply using GBO's tags. In the case of the input fields for name and address, GBO's tags can render a name or an address entered into an HTML form whose fields, labels, and order conform to the user's cultural expectations. In the case of the calendar, GBO's tags can display a pop-up calendar window whose first day and weekend adhere to the cultural convention of the user. In addition, GBO allows programmers, within limits, to customize the display of the graphical controls to match ... (more)

Bowstreet Says They Contributed To SOA Web Services To Reach Mainstream

Today's announcement of IBM's acquisition of DataPower seemed to fuel the rush to SOA Web Services market by almost every other software company out there. We started to see a similar gold rush we have seen ten years ago with the invent of Java, which seems to be now SOA Web Services. Bowstreet is one of the SOA-based portal market players and they recently summarized their accomplishment in this market over the past 12 months in a press relase. Here is what they have to say. Bowstreet announced that it is building off its first half success with continued growth and validation of its leadership position in the SOA-based portal market.  The company reported that it continues to build on its longstanding relationship with IBM by completing over 70 Bowstreet Portlet Factory for WebSphere Portal transactions year-to-date. In addition, the company reported that in Q3 it... (more)

QTC Prescribes Above All's SOA Platform To Connect Physicians With Claimants

QTC Management Inc., the largest provider of medical disability evaluations in the US, has selected Above All Composite Application Platform, the flagship product of Above All Software, a Redwood City, California-based business integration software provider, to develop an application that will reduce operational costs while improving claimant satisfaction by shortening time to medical care. The composite application will integrate three critical information assets: their sales force automation application and two systems that house medical provider credentialing and recruitment tracking information. This will enable QTC to provide better service to their biggest customers, insurance companies, by more quickly matching disability benefit claimants with specific medical providers in any given geographic area. “QTC has constantly set a very high bar for how to use ... (more)