By John Fontana
Network World, 09/24/01
Web services. Those words are like a constant ringing in the
ears of IT executives.
The hype ranges from Web services that automobile computers
will use to conduct real-time auctions to get the best gasoline prices, to
those that will electronically execute the transfer of medical and insurance
records to an emergency room.
But those scenarios are best left for George Jetson, the fictional
space-age cartoon character. The real story is more Fred Flintstone at this
point, as the industry tries to cut rock-solid blocks to build a foundation.
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Plain and simple, Web services are middleware based on XML.
Web services are the next evolutionary step in object-oriented programming
for business-to-business e-commerce. Common Object Request Broker Architecture
and Distributed Component Object Model couldn't get it done, and electronic
data interchange (EDI) was too expensive and specialized.
"It's all about middleware," says Don O'Toole, directory
of Web services marketing for IBM in Raleigh, N.C. "It's not sexy, but
it's essential."
Web services are what will bring all the buzz of XML into
fruition. Web services are bits of reusable code that let two or more Web-based
applications talk to each other. This code could be used to build new applications,
or it could be wrapped around legacy applications. With Web services in the
middle - or functioning as an independent application itself - Web-based applications
can share data among themselves regardless of their underlying programming
languages or platforms.
Like all object-oriented approaches, Web services require
a framework of standards to be interoperable. The first set, currently in
development, covers how they talk, how they describe what functions they can
perform and how they advertise themselves.
Should Web services take off - and the indications are strong
that they will - the cost of integrating applications over the Web should
be considerably reduced over the current "spaghetti code" method of hand-coding
each interface. The current method can add up to nearly $1 million to research,
test, deploy, license and support, according to Forrester Research.
"Integration is the heart of Web services," says Jim Price,
COO of Eskye.com in Indianapolis, an early adopter of Web services. "If
we had to take these integration projects one by one, we would be doing them
the rest of our lives and we wouldn't get any business done."
But Web services
won't usher in an interconnected, barrier-free world, experts
say. It will only ease integration of data and applications. And
it will only do that if vendors agree to uniform standards for
Web services.
The buzz today is threefold. The first area is around the
standards that will be used by developers to write Web services; second is
what can be accomplished today in the enterprise; and third is what vendors
are doing to court IT executives interested in Web services infrastructures.
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Building the standards
The foundation of Web services standards is XML. From XML
spawns three critical legs of Web services, all of which are still in development:
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Service Description Language (WSDL)
and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
Web services are nothing without XML standards. If the vendors
and standards bodies can't come up with a core set, then Web services will
be the next great vaporware. The vendors say they understand this truth.
"We are all working hard to avoid having the industry fracture,"
says Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy for IBM. "We need
this basic tripod to get started."
SOAP is the message protocol that lets Web services talk.
IBM, Microsoft and others released Version 1.1 in April 2000. Late last year,
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) formalized the standards process around
SOAP by forming the XML Protocol Working Group. In July, the group issued
the first public working draft of SOAP 1.2.
WSDL, which was submitted in January to the W3C, lets a Web
service describe what it can do, what messages it accepts and what response
it returns.
UDDI is a repository for locating Web services. Version 2
was released in June, and the third and final version is due next year. Creators
Microsoft, IBM and Ariba are running test implementations.
What's missing are standards for message routing and
reliability, transactions and workflow, and security. Security is perhaps
the biggest issue, especially when executable code is shared, says Daryl Plummer,
an analyst with Gartner.
"That is all very complex, and then you still have to talk
about scalability," Plummer says.
Despite some vendors' sunny outlook, the threat of fracture
is always present. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards is mirroring W3C's efforts. That group is working on something
similar to the Web services standard called ebXML, which has its roots in
EDI. In addition, there is a standard called XML-RPC, which essentially is
a lightweight counterpart to SOAP.
Early indications are that these efforts will converge. But
IT executives should watch closely to determine if the so-called standards
are truly that or just another battle of wills between engineers and vendors.
If the latter threatens, with vendors extending standards and otherwise not
following the protocols, then IT executives should step in and pressure their
vendors to cooperate.
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High-tech frontiersmen
Even as the standards are being formulated, early adopters
are testing their worthiness with some success. The fact that current Web
infrastructures don't need to change dramatically has helped the process,
vendors say.
"The change is from the middleware up, not down," says
Frank Moss, a pioneer in the XML field and CEO of Bowstreet, which develops
Web services software called Web Factory.
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Questions to ask Web service vendors
Which emerging Web services standards do you support (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL) and what is your plan for adding that support for standards you don't yet support?
What other emerging standards do you support (ebXML, XML-RPC)?
In what runtime
can I execute Web services developed with your tools?
Microsoft's .Net framework or Java Platform 2 Enterprise
Edition?
What pieces of infrastructure do you supply (i.e., application server and database) and which of these support Web services standards?
What is your security model?
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Randy Mowen, director of data management and e-business architecture
for moving and storage giant Bekins in Hillside, Ill., is in agreement.
Bekins plans to roll out a Web service application in November
that lets agents, suppliers and third-party trucking companies
bid on shipping jobs.
"Creating the Web service was simple and straightforward
because we had the infrastructure [to support Web services]; without that
it's difficult," Mowen says. "Once we put it out there all our customers
can integrate it with their own capacity planning systems."
It also lets Bekins' business partners tender bids more
quickly because the three or four steps to verify a bid are built into one
Web service that lets all the applications talk to one another.
"It will be a year or two before we see if Web services
will be widely embraced," Mowen says. "If they are, it will be life altering."
Galileo International of Denver, which provides services to
the travel industry, is also jumping on board with a three-year plan it calls
Business Enabled Service Transformation. The program aims to use Web services
to simplify the supply chain and collaboration between Galileo and 43,000
travel agents, 505 airlines, 37 car rental companies, 47,000 hotel properties,
368 tour operators and major cruise lines that it connects with worldwide.
That's a lot of integration work, some of which is solved
today with direct connections to business partners. Web services would not
only ease existing integration headaches but let new connections and applications
be built quickly, says Chuck Barnhart, vice president of application development.
Galileo plans to create hundreds of Web services components
for such things as customer profiles and preferences, policies for point of
sale procedures, management of vendor inventory and extending features to
its Web site.
"We can then aggregate those components into new applications,
extend our business without having to build legacy applications, and we can
speed our time to market," says Glen Zwart, Galileo's principal engineer.
"The walls are starting to come down across our platforms."
Eskye.com is seeing the same crumbling of barriers. Eskye.com
brokers relationships between retailers, distributors and suppliers in the
beverage and alcohol industry. In July, the company launched its ebots R (electronic
beverage order and tracking system for retailers), a set of standard interfaces
built onto order, freight and shipping processes that retailers and distributors
can plug into. Previously, the company used antiquated and separate applications,
including FTP, to send and receive product catalogs.
Eskye.com also is developing ebots SL (supply link), which
are Web services to fully integrate with its suppliers' ERP systems.
"The key benefit will be the ability to easily bring multiple
applications to retailers, distributors and suppliers," COO Jim Price says.
"Web services mean reduced integration time and speed of delivery of those
applications."
But Price admits that creating all these Web services won't
be easy. "Obviously, we have to walk before we can run," he says.
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Clash of the Titans
Walking includes navigating through the crucial but hard choice
of platforms and development tools, says Peter Urban, an analyst with AMR
Research.
Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and BEA Systems
are all in the market, and each wants to be a one-stop shop. Still the basic
choice boils down to Sun's Java language and Java 2 Platform Enterprise
Edition (J2EE) framework, or Microsoft's C# language and .Net framework.
True to form, Microsoft has been criticized for making .Net
too proprietary. But in its defense, Microsoft has mapped many different languages
to .Net. In Sun's corner is the fact that Java will run on many platforms,
and other vendors, including IBM and BEA, have already based their offerings
on the J2EE platform.
The crux is this: Web services must be written to execute
in a certain run-time environment because those written for Microsoft's
.Net framework and run-time engine will not execute on a J2EE platform. However,
Web services running on those two platforms can talk to each other using SOAP.
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Microsoft, therefore, is scrambling to get its six million
developers sold on C# and Visual Studio.Net, which is expected to ship by
year-end. It also has branded nine servers under the .Net banner to create
a back-end infrastructure for Web services.
"The vendors will not compete at the API level," says
Paul Flessner, senior vice president for .Net Enterprise Servers. Rather,
they are competing for the entire package - development tools, servers and
operating systems.
Sun is developing Sun Open Net Environment, a combination
of iPlanet application server and Sun's Forte development tools. Sun will
add support for SOAP by year-end and also is developing JaxPacks, which will
map XML to Java.
"We know we have to be 100% buzzword compliant," says
Matt Herring, director of marketing for Forte tools. "But our goal is to
provide the open architecture and compete on implementation." Sun also is
proposing to develop "smart" Web services that understand what they are
doing, for who and why.
IBM also is building an infrastructure story with its Dynamic
E-Business strategy around WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli Systems and Lotus. Using
Web services standards built into those platforms, Tivoli will provide security
and management and Lotus collaboration tools such as instant messaging. IBM
is committed to Java and so far is ignoring C# for its development environment.
BEA is making noise with its WebLogic application server and
its E-Business Productivity tools. Meanwhile, Oracle has built its Oracle
Dynamic Services (ODS) around the recently released Oracle 9i Application
Server. ODS is packaged with Oracle's Internet Developer's Suite, which
supports both Java and XML using JDeveloper. The company added support for
SOAP but is missing support for other standards.
HP, once a Web services pioneer, is racing to keep pace. In
February, it rallied its Web services story around its NetAction application
server, which it acquired from Bluestone, and HP OpenView for systems management.
In April, it finally added development tools in an alliance with WebGain.
But the vendors are all in various stages of rollouts, with
the bottom line being that Web services infrastructure is still 12 to 24 months
from maturing. Core products may be available, but updating everything, tying
it together and incorporating Web services standards will take time for vendors
and companies.
Gartner predicts most platforms will support the basic Web
services infrastructure - SOAP, WSDL and UDDI - by 2003 at the latest. At
that time, Gartner predicts, 75% of all Web services will run on infrastructures
provided by IBM, Microsoft and two or three other vendors to be determined.
But the best advice is to ignore the buzz and proceed slowly.
"The important thing for most organizations to understand
in 2001 is that they are not likely to get whipped by the competition based
on Web services," says Evan Quinn, an analyst with Hurwitz Group. "There
is still time to get educated."
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