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Web services: The productive, non-disruptive way

By Henry Adams
Johannesburg, 12 Nov 2003

The activity surrounding Web services has reached near-hysterical proportions, with hordes of companies, ranging in size from one-man shows to global IT giants, claiming compliance with standards that have not been ratified yet and pushing new products into the market.

It`s not only new tools that hold the potential for improving sales and assisting companies in escaping the doldrums of the IT downturn, however. Many of the larger software manufacturers are also drooling at the prospect of flogging upgrades to various supporting products such as servers, operating systems and databases.

"Any company moving to a Web services-based architecture will find their expenses climbing as the list of new or upgraded products they need to make their Web services architecture work, is getting longer and longer," says Henry Adams, country manager for InterSystems South Africa. "This, unfortunately, also includes the corporate database."

Most databases in use have been updated to handle XML and object-oriented schemas in some fashion - mostly through add-ons and an increase in resource requirements - and they will therefore be able to squeeze out some form of Web services support as well. However, the idea behind the componentised development of Web services is that small applications can be combined and integrated on the fly, over the Internet. This requires, among other things, speed and instantaneous responses from databases.

"Your average database administrator will be able to tell you that add-ons will not provide the required speed or reliability that Web services demands from a database," continues Adams. "What you need is Web services capabilities integrated and called natively in the database. This eliminates the need for middleware and adds a layer of security by addressing the database directly, while removing at least one layer of time-wasting admin normally stuck between the database and the application."

Web services can be considered as a collection of methods that can be invoked from an arbitrary client to fulfil a set of related operations. To make this possible, all Web services use simple object access protocol (SOAP), which is based on the XML standard. A database that inherently understands XML as well as other object data types will make dealing with Web services simpler.

Having a database with native Web services capability has multiple benefits:

* There is no requirement for middleware of any type as requests are fulfilled directly against the database, reducing the cost and complexity of going the Web services route;

* Companies wanting to test Web services today can do so without incurring cost or risk since existing applications can be reused as Web services; alternatively, companies can adopt a wait-and-see approach to determine when is the right time to dip their toes in the Web services water; and

* Because there is no middleware or translation requirements, there is also no overhead in terms of performance.

Apart from the cost and associated savings, a Web services-ready database also reduces the amount of work that would need to be done in a conventional organisation seeking to transform traditional applications to Web services systems. "By handling all this centrally from the database, companies are able to convert without rewriting everything, without buying a host of new operating systems and databases, and they can ensure the job is done just once with a guaranteed compliance to standards."

InterSystems` CACH'E database not only understands XML; it is fully object-oriented. "This means a method written to communicate with the world via object orientation or relational data access, for example, can also be exposed as a Web service by CACH'E 5," explains Adams. "A simple tag added to the XML is all that`s needed and the underlying database does all the work to produce a standards-based Web services application."

Today, most database technologies require client-server-like access or middleware to expose Web services. CACH'E supports this, but in addition, CACH'E also offers a unique approach where any data element can become Web service enabled directly from the underlying engine providing significant performance, time to market and cost benefits.

CACH'E, as a post-relational database, was designed to support multiple, complex data types. The same database can natively support relational data, business intelligence in real-time and object technology; and with Web services being in essence a series of clustered objects, the foundation for Web services had already been laid when the database was designed.

"The architecture of CACH'E is what allows it to cope with potentially disruptive new technology waves," concludes Adams. "It should allow our software partners and customers to continue to respond appropriately to whatever technology or business throws at them."

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Editorial contacts

Henry Adams
.InterSystems.
(011) 324 1800
hadams@intersystems.com