Monday, January 26, 2004		Guest Speak

At your Web service
Munesh Jalota

Organisations need applications and services that are as nimble as the business climate in which they operate. But until now, few could afford the expensive "rip and replace" process often required to move to a more flexible, services-based architecture.

Executives have lost patience with technology that doesn’t align with the business or fulfil its original promise. However, there is still a heavy mandate to leverage technology to gain competitive advantage. Solution requirements for the next generation of enterprise applications present complex challenges to IT development. Web services-based integration and interaction, and secure identity management are critical to today’s enterprise application development requirements. The fuel for new applications is locked in legacy mainframe and midrange systems, or vendor-packaged applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These applications may have accumulated over a period of decades. Each was designed to address discrete departmental needs with the technology "state-of-the-art" of their time. They were not designed to communicate with each other, or take advantage of the Web. New business solutions must exploit these valuable assets without disrupting the current business system operations.

Decoupling

In such a situation, decoupling the services provided by these applications from their operating platforms and user interfaces is the first step, which enables them to interact with other systems, people and processes. Such decoupled business functions that are able to communicate through a standard protocol are known as Web Services that operate freely over the Internet. The business value of Web services is that over the time, the cost of building applications decreases and responsiveness to new business situations increases phenomenally. That is because, as more Web services become available, new application development becomes a matter of assembling pre-built Web services rather than writing new software code.

Development of Web services involves technologies, such as XML, SOAP and WSDL that are well understood by Java developers. However, the existing business functions that must be transformed into a Web service can be written in legacy languages such as COBOL or PL/1. These technologies are unknown to Java developers. Once they connect to the legacy and packaged applications they struggle because they are unfamiliar with the legacy code. On the other hand, legacy programmers, who understand the business and the systems best, rarely make the transition to highly competent Java developers. Gartner estimates that only 40 per cent do this successfully. The most effective approach is to provide legacy developers with visual tools that enable them to transform business functionality into the Web services with minimal Java experience.

Create and integrate

Once Web services are created, they can be used to integrate systems with other systems, people with systems and processes and business with other businesses. These applications of Web services are known as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Straight Through Processing (STP) and B2B Integration respectively. Integrating Systems With Systems, a widely adopted application of Web services is enabling systems to communicate with each other in a standard way. Rather than moving information from system to system via batch process or tying them together by writing custom code, Web services enable systems to communicate using XML as an open standard protocol. This eliminates the latency of batch processes and the fragility of custom code. Many feel that EAI is synonymous with Web services. It is not. Like many other concepts, EAI pre-dates Web services and originally used a proprietary communication protocol. Today, EAI is dramatically enhanced by Web services.

A common and effective application of Web services integrates people with systems by providing real time access through a simple unified view. Examples of such "views" are emerging in industries such as financial services, insurance and telecommunications where advanced portals composed of windows into several different systems enable customers and partners to quickly get answers they need rather than relying on call centres. Web services greatly enhance EDI, by eliminating the dependency on Value Added Networks (VANs) and batch processes. Standards bodies such as ACORD (insurance) and Rosetta Net (electronic components and semiconductor mfg.) have established XML standards precisely for the purpose of automating business-to-business integration.

IT development needs a visual development environment that cuts across all necessary capabilities required for advanced Web applications making everyone more productive. A Web service radically simplifies the process.

Web services-based applications are exciting, but not practical unless they are secure. While choosing products and services for deploying new business applications based on Web services, it is important to understand that there are many vendors who market and sell technology pieces to this solution. An attempt to integrate these point solutions is cost intensive process that often results in the development of fragile applications. Therefore, it is important that one needs to adopt a more holistic approach that features the best combination of integrated products and professional services. This kind of an integrated approach ensures that projects are aligned to business strategy and solutions are supported through a smaller model that reduces the cost, so as to derive greater benefits from Web services.