vendor accent

Integration—the web services way

The business value of web services is that, the cost of building applications decreases and responsiveness to new business situations increases phenomenally over time. New application development becomes a matter of assembling pre-built web services, says Munesh Jalota

Today’s organisations need applications and services that are as nimble as the business climate they operate in. Until now, few could afford to “rip and replace” as often as was required to move to a more flexible, services-based architecture.

Today’s organisations need applications and services that are as nimble as the business climate they operate in. Until now, few could afford to “rip and replace” as often as was required to move to a more flexible, services-based architecture.

Executives have lost patience with technology that doesn’t align with business or fulfil its original promise. However, there is still a heavy mandate to leverage technology for competitive advantage. Solution requirements for the next generation of enterprise applications present complex challenges to IT development. Web services-based integration and interaction, and secure identity management have become critical to the enterprise application development process. The fuel for new applications is locked in legacy mainframe and mid-range systems, or vendor-packaged applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These applications may have been accumulated in an organisation over decades. Each was designed to address discrete departmental needs with the ‘state-of-the-art’ technology of their time. They were not designed to communicate with each other, or take advantage of the Web. New business solutions must exploit these valuable assets without disrupting existing systems and operations.

In such a situation, the decoupling of services provided by these applications from their platforms and user interfaces is the first step. This enables the services to interact with other systems, people and processes. Such decoupled business functions that are able to communicate through a standard protocol are known as web services. The business value of web services is that, over time, the cost of building applications decreases and responsiveness to new business situations increases phenomenally. The reason is that as more web services become available, new application development becomes a matter of assembling pre-built web services rather than writing new software code.

Development of web services involves technologies, such as XML, SOAP and WSDL that are well understood by Java developers. However, existing business functions that must be transformed into a web service can be written in legacy languages such as COBOL or PL/1. These technologies are unknown to Java developers. Once they connect to legacy and packaged applications they struggle because they are unfamiliar with legacy code. On the other hand, legacy programmers, who have the best understanding of business processes and systems, rarely make the transition to becoming highly competent Java developers. Gartner estimates that only 40 percent of them do this successfully. The most effective approach is to provide legacy developers with visual tools that enable them to transform business functionality into web services with minimal Java experience. Once web services are created, they can be used to integrate systems with other systems, people with systems and processes and a business with other businesses. These applications of web services are known as enterprise application integration (EAI), straight through processing (STP) and B2B integration respectively. Integrating systems with systems, a widely adopted application of web services lets systems communicate with each other in a standardised manner. Rather than move information from system to system by means of a batch process or tying them together by writing custom code, web services enable systems to communicate using the open standard-based XML protocol. This eliminates the latency of batch processes and the fragility of custom code. Many feel that EAI is synonymous with web services. It is not. Like many other concepts, EAI pre-dates web services and was originally used a proprietary communication protocol. Today EAI is dramatically enhanced by web services.

A common and an effective application of web services integrates people with systems by providing real time access through a simple unified view. Examples of such “views” are emerging in sectors such as financial services, insurance and telecommunications where advanced portals comprising windows of several different systems enable customers and partners to quickly get answers they need rather than rely on call centres. Customer service representatives also capitalise on these applications to provide quicker and thorough responses to customer queries. In many cases, providing real-time responses can be quite complicated. Requests such as “check inventory” require several systems to work together seamlessly to provide a unified response.

Web services can be assembled into complex services that orchestrate the transactions from system to system, aggregate their responses and then provide a single response as though it came from one system. This orchestration doesn’t always require a real-time response to a query. However, web services greatly enhance Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), by eliminating the dependency on value-added networks (VANs) and batch processes. Standards bodies such as ACORD (insurance) and Rosetta Net (electronic components and semiconductor manufacturing) have established XML standards precisely for the purpose of automating business-to-business integration.

IT development needs a visual development environment that cuts across all the necessary capabilities required for advanced web applications making everyone more productive. A web service radically simplifies the process.

Web services-based applications are exciting, but not practical unless they are secure. Secure identity management controls users, devices, and network resources as corporate assets ensuring that the right people have secure access to the right information when they need it. This capability becomes even more powerful when combined with the flexibility of web services.

However, while choosing products and services to deploy new business applications based on web services, it is important to understand that there are many vendors who market and sell the technology pieces of this solution. An attempt to integrate these point solutions is a cost-intensive process that often results in the development of fragile applications. Therefore it is important that one adopts a more holistic approach which features a good combination of integrated products and professional services. This kind of an integrated approach ensures that projects are aligned to business strategy and solutions are supported through a smaller model that reduces the cost, so as to derive maximum benefit from web services.

The author is Country Manager, Indian Sub-Continent, Onward Novell India and can be reached at mjalota@novell.com