White Paper : Web Services
Everybody is talking about web services as the next coming of the Internet, the
technology that's going to finally lift the pall from the technology sector. In this
white paper I'll explain the technical underpinnings of web services and give you an
overview of what might qualify them for the hype they've been getting.
Technology
Interestingly there are already a ton of web services out there. Every time you order a
book from Amazon, look up the weather on
Yahoo, or perform a search on
Google you're using a service offered on the web.
You can easily make use of all these services using your browser as the interface. If you
think about that for a second, and compare it to software before the Internet, I think
you'll agree that's quite amazing. The obvious thing the Internet has done for you is
give you access to more information. Perhaps less obvious is that it gives you access to
more software that you never had to install or learn to use.
Behind the weather service on Yahoo, or the book ordering system on Amazon is a ton of
software. Huge databases, reams of code, operating systems, computers, and you don't need
to know anything about any of it. Currently on the web all of that software is accessible
to people using a web browser. The next step is to make those services directly accessible
to software.
Let's back up a second there, a reasonable question would be "why is that the next step
?". Good question, glad I asked it. There are really a few key possibilities:
- The browser isn't the 'best' or the 'right' interface for a particular service.
- The service would be a useful part of a larger product.
- Other organizations want to use these services to provide information for their own systems.
Let's look at these in turn. Browsers are a great interface, for a while people thought
they might be a universal interface. Maybe none of us would ever have to learn another piece
of software again. Well...it sounded good a year or three ago, seems kind of silly now. Try
to shoe horn all the functionality we've ever needed into a browser? Not likely. Instead
we're going to continue to have rich, interactive, client environments outside the browser
window. So how do we make use of the information and services available on the Internet
from other software? Web services of course.
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