Technology

Web services offer ample benefits to develop business in the modern scenario. The advantages of web service technology outweigh the disadvantages, however, issues are to be constantly addressed to maintain standards. Cost effectiveness, code reuse, application  data integration, and versatility best attract business organizations in adopting web services in their growth path (Cavanaugh, 2006, p. 7).

Web service brings immediate response to an organization. The scope for outsourcing will be more with the service oriented architecture in place (Greer Jr, 2006, p. 17). Ad hoc business relationships and creation of potential marketplaces are the result of web services. The ability to integrate business solutions in the growing technology and the ability to adapt to the new technology for the changing needs of business are the positives achieved through web services. Ultimately, it is all about improving business performance. Improving the business by optimizing cost, automating business processes, adapting to change and by taking new markets are all possible via web services. Web services benefit the growing organizations by via
(1) Reduced integration cost, (2) improved return on investment (ROI) in existing systems, (3) increased application portfolio agility, (4) enhanced IT operational efficiency, (5) shorter application time to market, (6) easier merger and acquisition (M  A) activity. (7) reduced supply chain fiction, (8) service oriented architectures (SOA) feasibility, (9) automated and orchestrated business processes, and (10) enterprise transformation (Greer Jr, 2006, p. 21).

Code reuse is an advantage of web services. This maintains that one service might be placed by several clients to fulfill different business objectives. The services proved are cost effective mainly because of its open standards. WSDL is standard based and it prevents developers from inserting any language specific constructs. Interoperability is the rationale behind using web services. The need to create highly customized applications for integrating data is avoided thereby providing easy interoperability through web services. The associated learning curve is relatively smaller. The investment on additional technology is always kept to a minimum due to the fact that the protocols already exist everywhere.

Web service based applications mostly support e-business processes (Lee, 2008, p. 188). The application development trends are categorized as (1) enterprise application integration, (2) interoperability with key business partners, and (3) interoperability across multiple enterprises.

An important factor in the implementation of the service reuse program is the relationship between suppliers and consumers. It is important to examine the issues related to web service from the perspective of all the stakeholders namely web service providers, web service consumers, and standards organizations. The relationships between these three have to be understood at all levels (Lee, 2008, p. 189). The challenges in integration are mainly categorized as technical and managerial. These challenges are presented from the three stakeholders perspective.  The technical challenges are (1) service description and profile, (2) web services accessibility and documentation, (3) architecture standards and infrastructure, (4) design requirements, and (5) web service evolution (Lee, 2008, p. 193).

The managerial challenges are (1) pricing and quality of service commitments, (2) identifying new services, (3) customer feedback and support, (4) partnerships with third party providers, and (5) demand management and liability (Lee, 2008, p. 195).

The web services for users look simple but actually developing and implementing them are more challenging. For example, writing codes may be a complicated process. There are tools that auto-generate WSDL code. To meet the challenges of modern web services, Altova has created a suit of tools for designing and building web services in a graphical manner. This allows developers to build well designed, standards-conformant, interoperable web services without manual coding. Here developers can build their WSDL files graphically through validation and editing help. The WSDL codes are generated behind the scene where it can be validated and edited later. Altova helps in mapping and automation process to get the corresponding data sources.

Altova XML Spy and MapForce help to create web services from start to finish in a visual manner thereby making the development quicker and reducing errors introduced by manual coding (Yu et al., 2006, p.20).
Tremendous business opportunities are wide open with the help of XML based web services. We can integrate our software with any other piece of software. We can run it on any machine. This ease of integration enables tremendous business opportunities in efficient manner. One can develop applications much faster.

There is no external data source required. We can request and get information at real-time and transform it into our own format. With the advent of XML technology, web services readily make information available for anyone at any time, at any place and on any smart device. Dollar rent a car is a website program built, tested and deployed in a record speed of time that translates reservation requests and data between the companys mainframe business edition system in an airline partners UNIX servers. The same integration model can be reused with any business partners. Expedia.com is a web site that finds the lowest price itineraries. These itineraries are in the process of getting converted to communication centers where users get timely information through web services (Benefits of web Services, p.1).

According to REST (Representational State Transfer), each unique URL is a representation of some object. Yahoos web services including Flicker, del.icio.us API use REST. Pubsub, technorati, eBay and Amazon have web services for both REST and SOAP. Google implements its IP services to use SOAP. REST is a more trendy way of creating web services. The advantages of REST web services are (1) Light weight - not a lot of extra xml markup, (2) Human Readable Results, (3) Easy to build - no toolkits required. The advantages of SOAP are (1) Easy to consume, (2) Rigid, and (3) Development tools. Googles AdWords web service uses SOAP headers and is really hard to consume. On the other side, Amazons REST web service can sometimes be tricky to parse because it is highly nested and the result schema can vary quite a bit based on what you search for. Whichever architecture is chosen, it has to be easy for developers to access and well documented (REST vs SOAP Web Services, 2005, p.1).

XML is simple, reliable and easy to blend existing systems with new applications.
The plain text protocols use verbose method to identify data. So the service requests are larger than requests encoded with a binary protocol. The extra size becomes a hindrance over low-speed connections or when the connection is extremely busy. HTTP and HTTPS are not meant for long-term sessions. After making requests, they get disconnected in a specified time. Whereas in a CORBA environment, the server may stay connected for an extended period of time. HTTP and HTTPS protocols are stateless. The client and server does not know each other when no data is exchanged or during a power outage. So there needs to be a way to track from when the client is disconnected.

The server assumes that the client is inactive if it does not receive any request after a predetermined amount of time and it removes the information it gathered. This extra overhead means more work for web service developers.

Web site provides large customer bases. It is available 24 hours a day keeping the option of doing business with client and server exchanging data back and forth. Websites are environmentally friendly, reduces staffing, provides online shopping experience, etc.

Though interoperability is a major concern, quality of web services, web service management, and security are issues haunting web services.  A major challenge the web service have today is to develop a security and privacy mechanism to fulfill the requirements (Yu et al., 2006, p.2). The foundational underpinning is overlooked and the focus is more on technological aspects in deploying web services. The web service management system (WSMS) is a comprehensive remark for the web service life cycle including developing, deploying, publishing, discovering, composing, monitoring, and optimizing access to web services (Yu et al., 2006, p.3). Issues pertaining to several web services and individual web services such as security protocols and policies, quality of web service for optimization purposes have to be settled before they are combined (Yu et al., 2006, p.4). Selecting only individual services is not enough since some services may be related to each other. Combining properties of multiple services is an important issue.

Security is one of the major issues in deploying web services. Authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and integrity are to be maintained to resolve security issues (Yu et al., 2006, p. 9).

A Netherlands based web services software maker started a web services package called Cordys for enterprise applications. The specialty of Cordys is its unified architecture approach. It creates a new business logic and is built on XML and open standards.

Web services are adopted along two parallel paths. The IT department is driving the first part that has very few initiatives involving production deployments of the technology. Non-technology line executives are driving the second adoption path which is more prevalent to date. The rapid pace of adoption by line executives is encouraging because it confirms that the real economic value proposition of the technology is compelling. The executives are focused on near term business impact. In other words they are more opportunistic in terms of business. Altogether, from a business perspective, the early adoption of web service technology is largely ah hoc and opportunistic.  These deployments may solve near term business problems but without a broader architectural vision towards long-term value-creation. Web services technology certainly will deliver near-term business impact. The challenge lies in maximizing this near-term impact while also building the foundations for the real economic prize the longer-term business value creation opportunities created by the deployment of SOA architectures (View Point, 2003). It difficult to predict the future of web services. Zap Think, believes that Web Services Revolution will be earth shattering when it arrives in full force (Greer Jr, 2006, p. 25).