Will SOAP wash away those Business Integration issues?

By IT-Director 06 Mar 2003 | IT-Director.com, special to SearchWebServices.com

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Market Analysis

Over the years there have been various initiatives aimed at satisfying the needs of Business Integration.

EDI served the needs of the time. The move towards a distributed, rather than centralised, computing model saw the emergence of standards and protocols such as COBRA, COM, COM+ and DCOM. And then there have been the traditional middleware and messaging solutions. The dot com era bought the compounded need to integrate outside of the organisation, a need that the industry attempted to satisfy with EAI.

Anyone remotely connected with IT is all too aware of Web services being hailed as the next big thing. At the moment, Web services are on the drawing board. The idea is sound. Plug-and-play applications, reuse of code, developers that are more effective and if you want it, everything delivered on a pay-as-you-go model.

Developers will have to understand the different approach to application development but the concepts are quite simple. Applications are built by looking at the Universal Description Discovery Integration (UDDI) to find the program you want, one program knows how to interact with one another through the use of Web Services Description Language (WSDL), whilst the data aspects of interaction are taken care of by eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and last but by no means least is Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), to glue it all together.

Many enterprises are currently dipping their toes in the Web services pool. The first stage is simply to use the techniques within the enterprise. Next will be the integration with customers, suppliers and partners through Web services. The final stage the full blown global implementations where applications, or parts of applications, are put out on the Internet ready for use by anyone, on a pay-as-you-go-basis.

Exciting and revolutionary as the concept of Web services is, it is not by any means a quick solution to an enterprise's integration issues and is certainly not an excuse to ignore integration. Remember legacy systems; every enterprise still has them, Client/Server and Internet browser based applications have not made these systems redundant, they are still there and will still be there when Web services are in full effect.

Web services are not here today and they will not be here tomorrow either. Integration by comparison was here yesterday, is still here today and will certainly be here tomorrow. The one thing that is known about the future is that the problem of integration will hinder enterprise's business operation, unless action is taken now.

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