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Be Nimble, But Be Safe
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April 3, 2003
By Lori MacVittie
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The buzz on the street is that 2003 is the year of Web services. But if the recent past has taught us anything, it's to be wary of investing in technology for technology's sake: There must be a definitive business justification. And despite the hype, Web services is no exception. Moreover, security experts are waving a big red flag, and you're taking notice--73 percent of readers polled for this article say lack of security is the albatross that's hindering widespread Web services adoption.
Lack of mature standards is also an issue: In a recent Peerstone Research poll, 52 percent of enterprises said immature standards are a major obstacle, and of the remaining respondents, 43 percent said they consider this a small, but significant roadblock to deployment of Web services.
Still, despite all that and tight budgets too, two key factors are enticing some businesses to dip their toes in to the Web services water.
The first, application integration, is gaining the most mind-share in the enterprise, especially in terms of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration). Typical application integration can require a significant investment in EAI products. While these applications decrease the time required to integrate applications into the business process, they require a heavy investment in training and developer resources or expensive integration consultants. In contrast, using Web services can significantly reduce the money and time involved in integrating applications. Web services are by nature both platform- and language-agnostic, so developers don't need to know the technical details of the application being integrated, nor must they learn a new programming language or spend hours poring over a system's API documentation.
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Indeed, most development environments that support Web services provide a mechanism by which developers can load the WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) file of an application providing a Web services interface and automatically generate a client interface, giving the developers more time to focus on adding the appropriate business logic.
The second driver is that Web services can ease business interactions by significantly reducing the time needed to implement and deploy B2B relationships. Assuming your supplier supports a Web services interface, your developer can download the WSDL, generate a client and write the business logic that will integrate the remote system into your business processes. We reviewed Web services platforms and their development environments (see "Serving Up SOAP," page 43) and were pleased to see that such automation is not a pipe dream.
The payoff behind Web services is business agility--the ability to respond quickly and cost-effectively to a changing economic environment. Today, for example, an enterprise may use the same component in any number of applications that perform a business task. If that task changes, it's necessary not only to change that specific component but to redeploy all applications that rely on the component. With Web services in play, however, you may only need to change a single component.
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