Creating a Web service is not a technology story that's limited to applications talking XML to one another and using registries. Rather, the real endgame is enabling companies to deliver useful services to key constituencies ­ employees, customers, and partners. To cite Metcalf's Law, ...

Whatever happened to the e-commerce movement? Is it an idea whose time has come...and gone? Was the idea of Web-based business just a passing fad despite the effusive predictions of the industry pundits?

By now, every Java developer and architect has heard the words 'Web service.' Loosely, a Web service can be described as any business enterprise asset enabled for access over the Web.

To the uninitiated, those unversed in the art of computing, 'building to scale' sounds like something architects do when they take one of those models to a board meeting for approval. It sounds a million miles away from what we understand in computing. Just for the record what do we ...

Though often spoken of as a technology of tomorrow, it's important to understand that Web services are already proving to be a key component of some of the products and projects of today. This month's article examines how Web services and .NET are becoming critical components of Pe...

Last month in Part I (WSJ Vol. 2 Issue 1) we discussed J2ME and accessing Web services from wireless devices using the XML-RPC protocol. In this article, we will consider SOAP as a vehicle for accessing Web services from wireless devices, comparing and contrast-ing it with XML-RPC....

Okay, so you've developed what you believe is a useful piece of code and exposed it to the world as a Web service. All comers may now rejoice in the warmth and glow of your artful coding. But who are the people and what are the business systems benefiting from your Web service? Are...

Web services is an emerging Internet programming paradigm that enables the remote invocation of software objects among heterogeneous systems over the Internet. There are two sides to Web services programming. On one side is the creation and deployment of Web service objects onto Intern...

Why Bother? When I was asked to focus this month's column on the subject of wireless and Web services, my immediate reaction was 'Why bother?' If you follow industry press and talk to prospects and customers, it seems that the brave new world of Web services is number 11 on the list o...

Imagine that Web services becomes successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved with the technology. Take your imagination even further and suppose that every single PC, workstation, and server on the face of the earth communicates using Web services. While that sounds lik...

Web services is often spoken of as a future technology, yet it's important to understand that Web services is already proving to be a key component of the products and projects of today.In this article I examine how Web services has become an enabling piece of Epic Data's Connectware f...

The transformation of Alliance Airlines was a challenging and painstaking experience. The gray hairs on my head and in my beard are firm reminders of the long days and sleepless nights that were required to deliver the end result. I know a few people at SilverStream who feel the sa...

Web services promise many advantages, such as faster development time, the ability to link disparate business systems together, enhanced software modularity, and increased congruence between business process models and computational architectures. With these in mind, many organizations...

In May 2000 I was invited to Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Redmond for a special 'technology experts' summit. At this summit, the forty or so of us in attendance were given a special sneak preview of a technology upon which Microsoft planned to 'bet the farm,' so to speak. They...

What happens when the hype of Web services meets the increasingly popular and ever-changing world of wireless computing? Most likely, confusion and disillusionment. In this two-part article, we'll explore the uncharted waters of wireless Web services. We'll use the J2ME platform for de...

What do you, the potential Web service provider, really want to get out of having published a Web service? A pat on the back? Notoriety? Fame and fortune? Garnering these elusive prizes from the available tools and platforms on the market today is difficult. But how about just a st...

The Web services model relies on a stack of software specifications that makes the interoperability of heterogeneous environments a viable possibility. Two essential specifications of this stack are WSDL (Web Service Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and...

During the rise of the Internet, the portal's roles as an aggregator of content, a means of personalizing Web access, and a conduit to various online communities became a mainstay of life on the Web. Accordingly, portal sites enjoyed the position of 'sure thing' players because they de...

It's tempting for those with a background in distributed objects to look at the upcoming Web services standards as just another set of distributed object technologies, probably with some misgivings about reinventing the wheel. Conversely, with the advent of Web services it may be tempt...

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an industry-standard XML vocabulary used to describe and expose services for client consumption. To be more precise, it's a simple, extensible, and reusable interface definition language that serves to specify Web service operations, mess...

I was recently sketching out an overview of Web services for a colleague, including SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. After a few minutes he came to the conclusion, 'Ah, it's like CORBA, but using XML and HTTP.' While this may have reflected the paucity of my description, it did seem to echo the o...

As we can see from the tables, Web services measure up quite nicely with other distributed systems environments. The main differentiating characteristics are: Web services, unlike other distributed systems, support only remote communications, they don't support colocated services. Web...

Get ready, because soon the big knock will be at your door and your boss will be standing there with a single question for you: Should we go with .NET or J2EE for our Web services? Know a couple of things right off the bat. Big bucks will ride on your answer because, whichever directio...

Starting with a brief look at how developers build systems in J2EE and CORBA, I'll compare these two well-understood approaches to Web Services. Then I'll give a real-world example of Web services. By fleshing out this example, we'll see the business and technical issues relative t...

Current trends in IT and business computing indicate an evolution toward the dynamic exchange of business information, market intelligence, and commercial transactions. Technology standards such as XML have provided the common language needed to interoperate effectively across netw...

The Web services paradigm promises enterprises a flexible and robust infrastructure for assembling loosely coupled systems. Organizations can expose existing functionality to trading partners inside the company, within a consortium, and across an industry. Interfaces are well speci...

Over the course of the last year, we've all read many articles on Web services and the various standards forming to address the different levels of the Web services stack (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, ebXML). The stock quote example is becoming as recognized as 'Hello World' from our intr...

By their very nature, Web services operate in a loosely-coupled, geographically-dispersed environ-ment. From an infrastructure perspective, what does this mean for transaction processing systems? Do the existing approaches to handling transactions through the use of an XA-compliant, tw...

Let's focus on the evolution of the Simple Object Access Protocol from its XML roots. In particular, I discuss how XML serves as the impetus for SOAP, and how its extensible nature can be used to effectively serialize data for distributed messaging. Let's begin by creating a simple XML...

With the widespread use of component technology, it has become increasingly important to employ components in distributed computing environments. Currently, a handful of distributed component platforms exists, including the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Common Object Reque...

Web services provide a method for encapsulating applications and making them usable in new contexts. Web services technologies are based on two concepts: a service-oriented para-digm and shared standards. The service-oriented paradigm supports one-time encapsulation of business process...

Web services are XML-based building blocks for assembling distributed systems. Now that it's everyone's favorite buzzword, many developers are interested in experimenting with the technology to see what the excitement is all about.

For nearly 160 years, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) has been collecting and providing information and analysis on public and private companies worldwide. As a business information company, D&B relies heavily upon technology to support data that produces up-to-the-minute decisioning products. ...

Just the first of many fun tools for the enterprising Web developer. By now, you've read the hype. You know that Web Services is the 'next big thing.' You know it utilizes the hottest technologies such as SOAP and UDDI, but if you are like me, you are tired of reading white papers, hig...

Microsoft recently released the beta 1 of the SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio version 2.0. While the new release still has some rough spots, the toolkit has provided developers with an easy way to deploy Web Services, especially for those running on the Windows platform. Version 2 of th...

Get ready, because soon the big knock will be at your door and your boss will be standing there with a single question for you: Should we go with .NET or J2EE for our Web services?

If you weren't there, a couple of years from now you'll misremember and say you were. That's how big - how momentous - Web Services Edge 2001 West and XML Edge 2001 were. Call that late October conference in Santa Clara the Woodstock of Web services because this is the one everyone wis...