Why do I need a Web service?

Web|web Service
Schema Web service: Why do I need Web services?




Content:

The challenges facing
Wrong solution: Complex system Docking Solution
The right solution: Web Services and Business Web
Web Services is the future?
What is a Web service?
Resources
Author Introduction


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Chai Xiaolu (fennivel@uddi-china.org)
Chief System Architect
July 9, 2001

This article is the first of a series of articles on architecture Web services, starting with the business requirements of Web services to explore why Web services are used. First of all, the author analyzes the current challenges faced by E-commerce applications: Pragmatism and the pursuit of economic benefits is the demand of e-commerce today. However, the current application of E-commerce system architecture makes this business needs difficult to achieve, complex application of connection and program code caused the application of high maintenance costs and update costs. And as the innovation of the existing technology (rather than the revolution) of the Web services is able to solve this problem, the current application environment is the most reasonable solution.
Web services seem to be a brand new term, now go to the major technology forums, and no one is concerned about the development of Web services. But what is a Web service? Many technicians first touch Web services, there is an illusion that this is a new system architecture, the new programming environment. Yes, Web Services is a new concept, but his system architecture, his implementation technology is completely inherit the technology, will never make the existing application of the restart, but the existing application of the Internet-oriented extension.

In this series, the author describes the architecture process of Web services in detail from what is a Web service, why a Web service is needed, and the building pattern of a Web service, combined with an instance.

The resources cited in this article mainly include two categories, one is the Web Services Technical Resources Web site, contains a large number of Web services technical information, the other is the Web services "stack" series of technical specifications, they are a whole technical system, including UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, XML and so on. At the end of this article, the links to these resources are given, and interested readers can find what they need through these resource links.

The challenges facing

We know that the era of "crazy investment" in the/com of the IT industry over the past decade has passed, and it was an experimental era. And now, the entire industry has entered a pragmatic stage, the current focus of e-commerce development has been entirely from the past. COM's model to the traditional enterprise E-commerce process. Since it is the e-business of enterprises, whether the model is a new secondary, and whether it can bring economic benefits for the enterprise is the main. When planning the application of e-business in enterprises, enterprise managers and system architects pay more attention to whether the application of E-commerce can bring direct economic benefits to the enterprise, whether it is beneficial to cut down the cost of expenditure, and whether to optimize the use of resources, which is entirely driven by the business interests of the enterprise, In this round of e-commerce development, technology is entirely for business services, any departure from the business needs of the "new" technology is bound to be useless.

In the days when it investment plummeted, system architects carefully and extensively textual research, in the enterprise's own operational mechanism of the practical careful investigation, summed up some (relatively small, only 7 kinds of) the current most valuable implementation of E-COMMERCE applications, they are:

Enterprise Portal (Portal): Enterprise Portal and general information portal is essentially different, the Enterprise Portal is mainly for the enterprise's important customers, partners and their own staff services. It should be personalized (where personalization is not just a page) and should provide a range of online services that enable customers, partners, and employees to use the Enterprise Portal to obtain the necessary knowledge/information to interact and transaction with enterprise applications through enterprise portals.

Online chain store (storefront): In order to expand the market of products and services, expand sales channels and increase sales, enterprises should establish their own brand identity of the online chain stores. It should be noted that the so-called online chain stores are not said to use a variety of languages in various countries to build online stores, this is only one of the form, more should be the company's online stores can be added to a variety of online entities, such as portals, industry trading Market ( E-marketplace), urban engines and so on, so that the company's sales channels throughout the web space.

Group intranet (intranet) and knowledge base (Knowledge Base): The group's global intranet enables enterprise employees to communicate and collaborate effectively across the globe, leveraging the global resources of the enterprise to enhance overall productivity. The group's knowledge base enables employees to collaborate to provide the knowledge needed to work efficiently and to maximize employee productivity.

Supply Chain (Supply Chain) management: In order to enhance the overall competitiveness of enterprises, enterprises often need to maintain and enhance their relationships with their suppliers, the adoption of the pipeline form of procurement and minimize operating costs, and to do this, It is necessary to create a proprietary trading channel and a supply chain relationship for e-business applications to achieve this goal.

Customer Service: Through the establishment of such a customer-oriented service portal or self-service Sales Web site to achieve cross-regional sales, improve customer intimacy and satisfaction, and reduce service costs.

Distribution (distribution) management: the establishment of distribution management applications enables enterprises to rapidly expand distribution channels and explore new market opportunities. At the same time, companies can cut training costs, service costs and product distribution costs, and reduce storage costs.

Provides ASP (application service Provider) Services: Enterprises can gain new and additional revenue by deploying ASP services on the Web. The provision of a (application) ASP should be the core competitiveness of the digital performance, in general, its scope may include the aforementioned 6 kinds of E-commerce applications, 5: Enterprise Portal, online chain stores, supply chain management, customer service and distribution management.

In order to implement these e-business applications, there are several means: by their own IT department specific plan and implementation, outsourced to the software company or solution provider to plan and implement, of course, the solution or implementation plan may include platform software or proprietary software module procurement. However, regardless of its own IT department or outsourced solution provider, its implementation plan is to apply before the formal operation. Once applications are deployed, these e-commerce applications will inevitably need to be revised and updated to conform to the new e-business process, as business environments and business needs evolve and evolve. In the end, business executives will even want to tailor specific applications for their employees, customers, and partners to achieve maximum commercial benefits and remain competitive.

Of the possibilities for these application updates, the following three may be the most important and frequently occurring:

Often adds new e-business applications, which often happen every few weeks or every few months;
Often changes are made to the e-business process, often once a week or every few days;
Changes are often made at the user's request, even every hour, especially when it is necessary to tailor their preferred e-business applications for each customer, each partner, or every enterprise employee.
There is no doubt that e-enterprises must face up to the challenges of this issue, the frequent application of the update is today's E-commerce application deployment is facing the biggest problem, how to enhance the responsiveness of enterprises, reduce response expenses, enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, is all e-business must face the problem.

Wrong solution: Complex system Docking Solution

In order to achieve the goal of maintaining the core competitiveness of the enterprise, most enterprises are struggling, no doubt they have invested a lot of money and resources in it, then their choice is correct? In business, is undoubtedly correct, "no e-commerce will be equal to No business", but the method? Did they take the right approach?

Let's first look at how most companies operate today.

At present, when building the e-business applications I mentioned earlier, programmers are usually implemented with "standalone solutions." That is, for each application, they write the connection code for each enterprise resource or external resource that is needed to make the application run. These resources include traditional systems (legacy systems) and databases, Web applications and Web resources, as well as the ongoing emergence of web services.


Programmers also need to write more code to enable a large number of users to access each application, such as through a company's web site, such as using a desktop application within the company. Since these applications are the product of "hard" programming, it is almost impossible to customize them. When the need to integrate into the new e-business process, the need for additional user groups to provide access to the interface, the need to inherit different E-commerce applications to provide users with a more complete value-added services, all of this has to start from the original system design. Why is that? Since all applications are implemented from a one-time-development perspective, none of the changes applied will need to be done by a specific programmer. In this way, it becomes extremely difficult to reuse e-business applications through integration across applications.

Because each application has its own unique infrastructure, these applications are unusually expensive to deploy, change, and maintain. Enterprises should not be able to configure each application with unique professional and technical personnel, and maintain close contact with different technical vendors or solutions suppliers. At the same time, these applications can not be easily inherited, and not with the scale of enterprise business expansion and easy to realize the scale of application expansion.

We are well aware that even with only one e-business application, the cost and complexity of creating, maintaining, and customizing is already staggering. Moreover, there are a number of such applications to be involved, and the high cost is to be known.

Let's look at the scenarios where an enterprise deploys several such e-business applications:

The first application, the total cost of the enterprise should be the development and deployment of the application costs, as well as the maintenance of the operating tense and update costs.

The second application, the development and deployment costs of the application is the same, but the enterprise needs to spend additional integration costs, and as the entire enterprise application environment becomes more complex, the maintenance and update cost of its operating tense may increase exponentially.

Similarly, when a third, fourth application is deployed, the cost to the enterprise may be staggering.

The actual operating conditions of such e-business applications, far from being able to rapidly increase business size, may even have the opposite effect, because at this point IT departments have to hire more employees and spend more money to manage these complex and confusing applications and maintain a variety of infrastructure for hosting applications.

Earlier E-commerce technologies such as EDI, Web edi (perhaps xml-based), content servers, application servers, EAI (Enterprise application integration), and those for creating enterprise portals and other individual e-business applications ( The 7 applications mentioned above can not solve this problem by designing independent solutions. They are powerless because they are, without exception, application development patterns that are based on complex application connectivity and do not have good integration capabilities, and are implemented through program code to connect users, e-business applications, and other information systems with complex application connections. This way of implementation is not effective to solve the frequent changes in e-commerce processes triggered by large costs, and can not effectively solve the needs of various types of user customization.

The right solution: Web Services and Business Web

In this section, I'll describe a solution that solves all of the above problems.



E-commerce needs to get rid of the implementation mode of the independent solution and need to discard the implementation method of complex system connection. An effective e-business application should never be based solely on the programmer and the complexity of the code. In the case of E-commerce, the traditional programmer-led development model should be replaced by an outward-oriented development model that is led by the user. A lengthy serial development cycle should be replaced by an immediate, fast application assembly. At the same time such applications should be born with high customization. If you look at the nature of business, this is from the time-tested concept of commercial technology: "Just-in-time manufacturing" and "scale scalable" concepts, we need to do is to extend the traditional business concept to e-commerce.

Read the description of the previous paragraph, you may think that this requires a more technical change in nature, in fact, otherwise.

The Web service based on XML technology is the best way to solve this problem. The use of Web services will change the current development model and the cost scale of the application deployment. A variety of Web services to achieve a certain degree of e-commerce functions, through the various E-commerce Web services are combined and integrated to create dynamic E-commerce applications. Web services can encapsulate information, behavior, data performance, and business processes uniformly, regardless of which systems and devices are used in the environment in which the application resides.

By using Web services, organizations can integrate their own e-commerce through abstraction and blending in ways that were previously impossible. When the core competitiveness of an enterprise is modular, then these core competencies can be easily shared among different enterprises, while the architecture of e-commerce applications across enterprises, the formation of business web.

In the business web, you will not be required to purchase applications that are hosted by this e-business application for the use of an e-business application. A Web service is a component that is not purchased and deployed, a new type of component that is deployed to the Internet once and then available everywhere, and all applications need to be able to connect to the Internet to use and integrate Web services. Through the adoption of Web services, the cost of development is significantly reduced, programmers do not have to interact with a variety of platforms, he only needs to interact with one component, that is, Web services, while the Web services invoke interface with the full adoption of standard XML and related technology, the cost of code implementation has also dropped significantly. By adopting Web services, the cost of deployment and integration is significantly reduced, and changes to the process do not need to change a large number of code, even through the support of tools, without changing the program code. At the same time, with the new Web services technology, such as the use of WSDL/UDDI/WSFL, Web services in the Run-time dynamic Assembly will become a reality, and each user can even be assembled in real time to the needs of users.

Web Services is the future?

Gartner Group, a global authoritative IT industry research critic, forecasts the development of Web services over the next 5 years:

In the 2001, the Architecture development tools for Web services will be developed by the major open providers. Developers are able to purchase these service-oriented development tools. And they will start building the Web services they actually use.

In the 2002, commercial Web services will emerge in large numbers, and a large number of consumer-facing Web services will be used.

In the 2003, UDDI registries became more and more important as Web services grew, and business data grew richer. Private UDDI registries will be put into use to support the exchange of internal service information. and government Web Services (e-government) applications will continue to emerge.

In the 2004, business applications based on Web services will generally be accepted by all types of enterprises, while the computing model of service concentration will enter the youth period. Private UDDI registries still have a dominant position in various applications. New revenue models and business channels will be visible everywhere. 40% of financial financial services transactions will use the Web service model. and 35% of online government services will be provided in the form of Web services.

In the 2005, public UDDI registries were used as a mechanism for exchanging public business information. Dynamic services will also be put into use in large quantities.

At the same time we see major technology providers rolling out the Web service's build tools as predicted by Gartner Group: Microsoft Visual Studio. NET,IBM's Web Services Toolkit,sun Sun One, and so on. The public technology standards based on Web services have either become SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/WSFL or are in the process of being developed, and the major technology providers and traditional commercial enterprises have been put into the framework of standard development and application. As the leader of the architecture of Web services, IBM and Microsoft are also starting to promote Web services technologies worldwide. We have reason to believe that Web services will become the mainstream technology of future dynamic business Web.

What is a Web service?

We have discussed the feasibility and necessity of Web services from the perspective of business requirements and the feasibility of technology implementation. Since most of the readers are technicians, I'm sure you'll be interested in the various implementations of Web services, and you'll be more interested in the process of Web services architecture, and must be very interested in how to use the Web services architecture in a particular case. I'll describe and provide the answers in a later section of this article series.

Resources

Web Service Technology/Comment website
webservices.org, Web Services Integrated class technology Web site.
IBM Developerworks/web Service Zone, IBM's WEB Services technology Resource Center
MSDN Online Web Services Developer Resources, Web Service Developer Resource Web site for Microsoft
Itpapers/web service, Itpapers's WEB Services review article
Interop Stack Series technical standard specification for addressing business-to-business e-business application interactions and integrations
UDDI Executive White Paper, uddi-china.org, uddi.org
UDDI Technology white Paper, uddi-china.org, uddi.org
UDDI Programmer API Specification, uddi-china.org, uddi.org
UDDI data structure Reference, uddi-china.org, uddi.org
Web Service Description Language (WSDL) 1.0, IBM, SEP 2000
Soap:simple Object Access PROTOCOL Specification 1.1, IBM, Microsoft, DevelopMentor, 2000
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition), the Consortium, 6 OCT 2000
Author Introduction

Chai Xiaolu: Shanghai Easy e-commerce Technology Co., Ltd. (dealeasy) chief System Architect, XML technical advisor. Uddi-china.org main core members. He received a master's degree in computer Science from Fudan University in 2000, and has been in the International Computer Science Conference (ICSC), Asia-Pacific XML Technology Symposium (XML asia/pacific ' 99), China XML Technology Symposium (Beijing), and computer scientific periodicals. Many papers have been published in major domestic conferences and periodicals. specialize in xml-based system integration and data exchange technology research, at the same time, database, object-oriented technology and CSCW technology is better. Joined the UDDI Advisor Group in 2001 and was involved in the development of UDDI specification V2.