WHITE PAPER: Web Services - A Straightforward Guide
The name "Web Services’ automatically makes you think of web browsers and internet shopping. Whilst web services might be part of the infrastructure of an on-line shop, IMS Ltd. argues that they mean much more and will find even greater use in the future.
Great Technology – Misleading Name!
A more descriptive name than "Web Services’ is Sun Microsystems’ “Software As A Service”. Imagine an accountancy firm completing your tax return. You supply your accountants with data (your income details, expenses, receipts, etc), and they perform a service for you and return your completed tax return, correctly and legally completed. This is a service provided for a fee, which means you don’t have to work through all the rules yourself. Likewise they provide the same service to lots of other clients who in exchange for data, receive a completed tax return.
“Software As A Service” is exactly the same thing – except it’s a service provided by one computer program to another, and in real time. Changing the example slightly, your company’s payroll software has to calculate your tax and National Insurance contributions every month, based on your salary & expenses (which it knows), your tax code (which the tax office sent the account department by post), and the current rules (which have to be programmed into the software and updated at least every year). Now imagine that the tax office computer provides a service whereby your payroll program sends your salary and expenses for the month, together with your national insurance number to identify you. The tax office program knows everything else, including the most recent rules, and the service does the calculation and sends back the tax required.
The benefits? Your company never has to write code for employee tax or national insurance calculations ever again. Also, when the chancellor changes the rules, the Inland Revenue change their calculations, and everyone automatically gets the sums done correctly.
So why call them “Web Services”?
At a technical level, the communication between computers uses HTTP over TCP/IP (the network protocol that the worldwide web uses), and the format of the communication is XML (a language a little like HTML but describing data not a document). This is important for company-to-company web services, as the company firewall probably already allows this sort of data through, so with appropriate security in place, little needs to change to support web services.. It’s also worth remembering that the idea of writing one piece of software and having lots of programs using it is not new. For example, all Microsoft Office programs share common components, as do other systems. The new aspect for web services is that the service and the calling program can now live on computers in completely different organisations, connected through the Internet.
So Who’s Using Web Services Now?
Major and some quite minor companies are using web services right now, but they’re not shouting about it just yet, and they’re using it within their own company intranets. Marks & Spencer has a great application for detecting fraud at the tills. When a customer card is swiped, the details of the transaction (the items, the card, the store, till, assistant etc.) are sent using web services to a central computer which checks for fraud. If there is anything suspicious, the store security staff are alerted and sent to the till, and then the assistant is notified. It takes about 30 seconds. Ford Financial in the US has several huge programs, including Web Services as a core part.
Will Web Services Benefit My Company?
Sun, Microsoft and IBM all agree that Web Services will change the way that software works, and are all spending huge sums on making sure that the technology works. When even these companies bury their differences and start to sort out a common security framework, then you can be sure that it’s important and will affect the business and markets you’re in.
The benefits will come in two ways:
First, applications for corporations are likely to be web services running within their own networks and firewalls. These organisations will benefit from better applications with less maintenance and a reduced overall IT cost. If they build a web service to handle one part of the company’s business requirement, it can be accessed by any new system that needs it. If the business logic changes, only the one web service needs to change and the whole organisation will automatically be using the right rules.
Secondly, and a couple of years away at the most, we will see companies offering web services on the web, to other companies. In this case, the benefits to the customer company are that they don’t even have to write or maintain the code, and the budget for the service can be set and monitored just like any other service cost.
Early-adopters are building systems now, and it’s recommended that companies start to become familiar with web services now. If you have services to offer other companies, or your organisation is building any new software system that might have more than one use, web services should be seriously considered.
Ends – 815 words
More information is available from the following web sites:
Information Management Solutions Ltd: www.informs.co.uk
The site includes an on-line demonstration of web services providing access to an exchange server to find out when employees are free for meetings.
Microsoft: www.microsoft.com
Enter “web services” in the search dialog box. There are articles at various technical levels. The article “The Programmable Web” is probably the best starter. Currently at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/0900/WebPlatform/WebPlatform.asp
Other examples at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/prodinfo/casestudies/fxsolutions.asp#marks and
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/oct01/10-08alertspr.asp
Sun: www.sun.com
Again, entering “web services” or “Sun ONE” in the search engine brings up a lot of information.
Try http://www.sun.com/executives/sunjournal/v5n1/feature1.html to start with.
The Ford case study at:
http://www.sun.com/service/sunps/success/case_studies/ford_cs3.html
