Introduction

Web Services is a vague term which is used to convey the coming development of computer system interfaces.

It is a notion which has been defined by Tim Berners Lee and the W3C consortium as being an important area for the future development of the Internet.

There is a lot of mystery surrounding these efforts together with a lot of hype around the technology.

Large corporations in the software industry like IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and SAP are currently gearing themselves up for the development of web services technologies.

Other corporations, users of software systems, who continually battle to try and reduce IS costs are wondering what benefits can possibly be realised by web services.

HST Applications (WebPage)

Technorati

W3C

Architecture

Use Cases / "Operational Scenarios"

Travel Agent Static

Travel Agent Dynamic

Purchasing like EDocs

Usage Scenarios

Open Questions:

Will Web Services fail due to one of

over-complex specification,

difficult to use specification,

lack of sponsorship,

lack of tight fit of specification

Recent Activity

2004-03-26 -W3C Web Services Description Working Group release draft WSDL 2.0

2004-03-22 IBM and BEA launch initiative on BPELJ integration of BPEL and Java

2004-02-11 - W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group Final Publications:
WS Architecture
WS Architecture Requirements
WS Usage Scenarios
WS Glossary
WS Service Managment Service Life Cycle
OWL Ontology

Two of the key issues with web services are Complexity and Suitability.

The standards as currently set out by the W3C are very complicated and it is not clear at the moment whether the standards will prevent the production of a lot of interfaces simply due to somplexity issues.

The suitability of the standards can also be questioned. The standards have been designed by committee, not rigorously tested by an external body and may possibly be too abstract and variable.

INDEX

Technologies
SOAP 1.0
SOAP 1.1
WSDL 1.0
WSDL 2.0
UDDI

WS Products
SAP Netweaver
MS .Net WSE
Collaxa BPEL Server
BEA WebLogic Integration

WS Utilities
Parasoft SOAPTest

Engineering Solutions for Web Services

W3C Domain Structure Architecture Domain
Interation Domain
Technology and Society Domain
Web Accessability Initiative

W3C Architecture Domain
XML Structured Data Exchange
Web Services
Internationalisation
URI Uniform Resource Identifiers
DOM Document Object Model

Scenario Classification

HST: Homogenous Single-Type
HMT: Heterogenous Multi-Type

Scenario

Pattern
Use Case

Reading