Johannesburg, 28 Oct 2003
Web services has moved beyond the hype stage and is now a reality for many enterprises. Forward-looking organisations are now looking to take the next step and leverage the power of Web services strategically across the enterprise.
Trevor van Rensburg, business unit manager: development best practices at Software Futures, says: "This next step means moving beyond simple point-to-point applications of Web services to a broad application of Web services technologies, both within the enterprise and increasingly among business partners.
"Making such a transition requires more than a simple change in programming practices. The broad application of Web services technologies requires an architectural change - a move to loosely coupled, standards-based, service-oriented architectures."
Software Futures represents IBM Rational in SA. The company recently announced Rational Rapid Developer, an architected rapid application development (ARAD) environment that enables developers to build applications that have a strong underlying architecture.
Van Rensburg's views are backed up by a Gartner report from August 2000, in which it says: "Enterprises interested in building long-lasting applications can, and should, design for e-services now."
It predicted that the middleware and tools vendors would deliver integration of a number of features that provide the ideal platform environment for service-oriented architecture (SOA), and that support a programming model centred around service interfaces that can be designed for a loosely coupled transaction topology. Gartner said the platform would support co-existence and co-operation of services, e-services and the underlying components.
Van Rensburg says: "Just as Web services evolved from traditional distributed computing techniques, the practice of service-oriented architecture evolved from the practice of enterprise architecture. The potential rewards are enormous for enterprises that understand this evolution and make the move to such architectures.
"The brave new e-world has turned previous assumptions on their head, and old approaches to business or software will no longer succeed. Hundreds of companies have built Web services pilot projects, proving that this most recent evolution of distributed computing technology can reduce integration and development costs substantially."
In a separate report, Gartner Dataquest recently released the results of several surveys on North American enterprises' adoption of Web services for use in in-house projects and system integration engagements. Analysis of the survey results shows that virtually all the respondents use some form of Web services or plan to do so within the next 12 months.
The Gartner Dataquest surveys show that Web services have entered the mainstream but also that users' understanding of Web services remains unsophisticated. The respondents claim, for example, that 92% of their system integration projects - and those projected through February 2004 - involve Web services.
The survey data also shows that 86% of enterprises use eXtensible Markup Language (XML). However, there are much lower usage rates for other Web services standards, such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), 31%; WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), 3%; and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), 14%. Projects that use only XML do not meet Gartner's criteria for Web services, the research house says.
Another result of the Gartner Dataquest research is that the use of Web services for in-house integration by systems integrators declined by 10% between August 2002 and February 2003, while the use of Web services by system integrators for B2B solutions increased by 8%.
Van Rensburg says: "The Unified Modelling Language is well suited to the new demands of the brave new e-world. It was designed to be distributed, concurrent and connected. This has led to a major movement in IT termed Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), championed by the Object Management Group (www.omg.org)."
The current incarnation of MDA states that architects should begin with a formal model of the system being built, ideally in UML. MDA begins with a platform-independent model that represents the functional requirements and use cases of system users. From this platform, independent model architects can derive whatever platform-dependent models they need in order to specify the design of the system under construction. "These platform-dependent models are so detailed that they can be used to automatically generate the implementation code itself," says Van Rensburg.
He concludes: "The core strength of MDA is that designs for systems are fully specified; there is little leeway for misinterpretation when the systems are built, and the models can be used to generate working code. UML is not tied to a single platform or programming language; therefore it is well suited to bridge networks of different systems. It was also designed with extensibility in mind, so it can adapt to new issues as they arise."
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