The computer
industry is addicted to words.
Not just any words but the words du
jour, the magic words of the moment which will draw the
favorable attention of journalists, analysts, and – most important
– customers. Not
remarkably, this means we use up a lot of words before their time
and render them useless by attaching them to nearly anything until
they become essentially meaningless*.
We’d hate to think that this will be the fate
of Web Services because we are just beginning to understand the
usefulness of this approach to building Internet-enabled
applications. The idea is very simple, allowing data and applications
to be connected across the Internet by using Open Standards such as
XML and SOAP. The idea
is not to limit such applications to living inside
a single company, but allowing them to be much more useful by
permitting them to share information and even complete transactions
across networks of suppliers, partners, and customers.
On May 14th, IBM announced its suite
of Web Services offerings.
Evolution
not Revolution
You should think of the IBM Web Services
offering as an evolution of IBM’s existing Middleware software
offering. This means
that they are built on mature, rich products, already well known to
customers, extended via XML interfaces and SOAP for
inter-application communication.
IBM Web Services’ Portfolio consists of extensions of
existing IBM products including:
|
Product
|
Function
|
Availability
|
|
DB2 with DB2/SML Extender
|
Relational database
supporting UDDI and SOAP
|
Shipping
|
|
WebSphere Application
Server, V. 4
|
Develop, publish and
deploy Web services applications via open standards including
UDDI, SOAP, J2EE, WSDL and integration of XML.
|
June 30, 2001
|
|
WebSphere Studio
Technology for Web Services
|
Tools to create, test and
deploy web services applications and to connect them to
existing business processes. Also can publish applications to a UDDI Registry
|
Preview:
July
General Availability:
Fall, 2001
|
|
WebSphere Business
Integrator
|
SW to integrate and manage
the flow of Web Services applications, within and between
enterprises; uses MQ Series and SOAP
|
June 30, 2001
|
|
Tivoli Manager for
WebSphere Application Server
|
Single point of control to
manage distributed environments using Web services
applications
|
Shipping
|
|
Tivoli Web Services
Manager
|
SW for monitoring the
entire Web services chain of transactions
|
Shipping
|
|
Tivoli SecureWay Policy
Director
|
Policy for Web services
applications including access management
|
Shipping
|
|
Lotus SW Portfolio
|
Support for Web services
applications. Many
Lotus products which support Open Standards can already
implement Web services via support for SOAP, WSDL, XML.
|
Shipping and Planned
|
|
Lotus Web Services
Enablement Kit
|
Enable building of Web
services applications for Lotus products
|
June 30, 2001;
To be available from www.alphaworks.ibm.com
at no cost |
All of the products in the offering are either
available immediately or will be available, in initial versions,
within the next 60 days.
Extend
Existing Investments
IBM believes customers want to create
cross-company, often cross-platform, applications without disturbing
their existing systems, software, and data.
This can be done in the IBM Web Services view of the world by
wrappering existing applications in XML and quickly connecting them
together. No changes
need to be made to the underlying application and changes to that
application will be inherited dynamically by the Web Service.
Connect and
Transact
IBM emphasizes that using Web Services to connect
is not enough. Business
needs will also require that transactions be supported.
IBM hopes, of course, that customers will find this an
important differentiation between IBM’s Web Services offering and
the offerings of other vendors.
Also, IBM can claim more experience in designing,
implementing, and supporting large scale transaction systems than
any other vendor and they want customers to be able to both be able
to draw on their experience as well as rely on their expertise.
The Web
Services Marketplace
IBM is certainly not alone in the Web Services
market. There are
already initiatives announced by Sun, Microsoft (.NET), and HP (some
combination of Netaction and OpenView).
Vendors like Oracle and Computer Associates offer many
answers to a “web services” search argument, but no specific
product strategies yet. Net
economy companies, new and old, send us daily dispatches trying to
tempt us with a web services tag line.
There’s only one problem here. Not everyone seems to mean the same thing.
There are some commonalities:
Open Standards, integrating applications, using the web as a
delivery platform. But
there’s lots of differences beyond that. Some vendors support every platform, while others favor only
one or two (their own, of course).
Some are very interested in connecting to existing (legacy)
applications; others are more interested in what you do starting
now.
Since there’s so much to look at, we’ve
decided an Opinions
White Paper is an appropriate forum and we’re working on
one now. Expect an
opportunity to view the results in about 45 to 60 days, depending on
how quickly we can get all those vendors to cooperate – and how
hard it is to make comparisons that seem useful.
-------------------------------
*If you’re having trouble
following my argument think about what happened to formerly chic
phrases like artificial intelligence, client/server computing, ASP,
and even peer-to-peer.
It follows a pattern. The first
time you see one of these phrases, we’re not sure what it means,
other than it’s ordinary English meaning, if it has one. But then
someone who’s used that catch phrase to describe what they’re
doing (or think they’re doing) succeeds – or at least gets a lot
of favorable attention. Soon,
everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Quickly, it gets very crowded.
Existing products are relabeled to give them a fresher, more
fashionable air. New
products not remotely related to the original idea, nevertheless
paste on some version of the phrase.
When Artificial Intelligence
reached this point, and we were getting the usual ten or twenty
announcements a week about artificially intelligent nearly anything,
I keep waiting to see one for an artificially intelligent stapler.
Why? Well, why
not? It made as much sense as some of the other silly stuff.
At this point, the phrase
usually collapses from over-use.
People start disclaiming it.
“Well, we’re not really an ASP,” they say.
“We’re an MSP.” You
ask what’s that and are solemnly assured that it’s a Messaging
Services Provider – a kind of ASP by another name, the concept
safely rescued by its relabeling.
Or it may be so badly damaged by its over-use that no one
wants to use it at all (think dot.com).
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