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the technology world is abuzz with talk of web services. code warriors and suits alike are touting it as the next big thing. the incorruptible apache software foundation has spawned a whole top-level project dedicated to it. yet, id venture a guess that relatively few of us completely understand the concept - and even fewer sense an immediate need to dive right in.
perhaps this is because web services is pitched in fuzzy marketing language (from which its difficult to extract anything concrete), most of which focuses on applying web service technology in the consumer market and in b2b transactions. these are real applications and will likely become ubiquitous in the years ahead, but the immediate utility of web services lies elsewhere.
the most exciting concrete thing about web services today is its potential to finally deliver when it comes to integrating internal systems. if you could be a fly on the cube wall at most big corporations, youd hear daily grousing about different systems not talking to each other and the need to enter the same data into several different applications, which costs us both in time and in the increased potential for data entry error.
its an old problem, and most of us can recite a long list of acronyms we once thought would help us solve it: corba, rmi, com, iop, iiop, rpc, and lately, ejbs. the problem with these methods of "distributing" applications is that theyre proprietary to a specific programming language or a narrow subset of languages. ejbs work well if youre trying to interconnect a far-flung set of java applications, but like it or not, much of the worlds economy is transacted on big iron via cobol and rpg (report program generator) - and they dont speak bytecode.
all of them, however, speak text. for all the fanfare, web services consists of little more than the exchange of text messages between peers. the text happens to be xml - and specially formatted xml at that - but text is still text. this inherent language independence - coupled with the fact that sun, microsoft, and ibm have actually agreed upon and contributed to the standards that constitute web services - is highly encouraging. all this has given rise to the latest acronym being bandied about among the it brass: eai, or enterprise application integration.
how web services actually work
web services, much like j2ee, is an umbrella term under which a number of related standards reside. web services is often thought of as a ... 下一页