Integration remains the number one IT priority; fully 60-70% of IT budgets are dedicated to it. Web services makes integrations simpler and cheaper. It makes B2B integrations practical. What businesses demand from a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is dynamic integration capability....

The benefits of BPM (business process management) reach from the mail room to the board room and beyond. BPM, with enhancements enabled by Web services, provides tactical benefits that significantly enhance application creation and extension, while delivering strategic benefits to comp...

The use of a range of wireless, Internet-enabled portable computing devices has dramatically extended the reach of online services. Nonetheless, complications such as wireless service gaps, time constraints, and hardware inconvenience can make contacting corporate enterprise systems wh...

The technical programs of technology conferences make very useful weather vanes for the state of the union in the technology space, and the i-technology devised by the advisory board for the seventh successive 'Edge' conference was no exception.

In order for companies to benefit from the strategic value of information technology, there needs to be much closer alignment between IT and the business side. So far, these two counterparts have had a difficult time seeing eye to eye. The problem is that despite earnest intentions b...

Even if you work for a great company, if it isn't a technology company it will mean that no matter how cool, obvious, or forward thinking technological advances are, you will always have to be able to translate their benefits into real business dollars and sense.

Best Book Understanding Web Services: XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI Addison-Wesley www.aw.com This book introduces the main ideas and concepts behind core and extended Web services technologies and provides developers with a primer for each of the major technologies that have emerged in t...

Those in the security business, like me, often complain that security is the last thing that people consider when designing a new application. If a little more thought had gone into the security of the e-mail protocols, for example, it would be easier to trace the true origin of an e-m...

Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, Web services' most compelling advantages are simultaneously its most serious dangers. Web services have passed the initial hype cycle. The convergence of industry support, ease of use, and the desire for cost-effective solutions for integration and ser...

'Now that millions of lines of code to Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 are readily available to anyone with a modem,' writes James Turner, 'Get ready for your twice-daily mandatory security patches, folks.'

The creation and adoption of 'standards' help to bring about interoperability. Within the management area, the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification, currently being developed within OASIS, is an attempt to bring about interoperability for the management of distribut...

IT managers are continually asked to do more with less. Competitive pressures and budgetary constraints compel IT departments to capitalize on the organization's existing infrastructure as well as maximize the value of any extensions or custom development efforts.

We all know that the ultimate goal of CRM is to achieve a consolidated, 360-degree view of the customer at any touch point. We know that when companies know more about their customers, they can provide better service and personalized marketing and selling - which translates into more p...

Within the IT industry, we're seeing a steady shift from an RPC (remote procedure call) integration style to asynchronous, document-based integration. More and more developers are realizing that asynchronous services are core to a new, loosely coupled and message-driven architectur...

Transactions are a common, everyday occurrence in our lives. When you buy something at the grocery store, transfer funds between bank accounts, or simply make a phone call you are executing a transaction.

A recent Accenture survey ('Web Services: IT Efficiency Today...Powerful Business Solutions Tomorrow,' January 2003) revealed that most C-level executives expect standards-based technology to deliver on the promise of Web services - and only 16% think Web services are 'cutting edge...

When discussing Web services, most people tend to focus on the core Web services framework (the standards and protocols) and the applications that you can build with the framework. Although I have no trouble waxing profusely on these topics, I get even more jazzed when I start to think...

Hmm..according to my latest Monthly Hype magazine, Web services open a whole new vista of applications to the world. Applications that have been unseen or unimagined by mankind. Everyone is asking about the Web Services Killer App. What is the Killer App?

E-business initiatives - such as enterprise, B2B, and B2C applications - typically reach throughout and beyond an enterprise, requiring users to move across networks, applications, and security domains. To be effective, this movement must be transparent to the user. Consider what's inv...

Message-centric vs RPC-style Web services is a long-standing debate and bone of contention regarding the proper use of Web services technologies. Early renditions of SOAP and XML-RPC were all about providing RPC-style interactions...in fact, that's all that was supported, so there real...

Web services is useful, but it is too complex to be implemented in many organizations. That's where [insert new technology here] comes in. Its simplification of systems integration will revolutionize the enterprise IT department. Sorry, I'm just getting a head start on the next wave of...

Services-oriented architecture (SOA) is quickly emerging as a strong technical foundation for enterprise applications. My company, involved in the development of application architecture solutions, has seen a growing emphasis on SOA to meet the integration, process-level reuse, and fle...

The concept of Web services has seen more than its fair share of media coverage over the last year. And so has the concept of service-oriented architectures, which is the use of Web services to define a model of loose coupling between applications. But the industry buzz regarding this ...

According to Gartner, Inc., vice president and research fellow Roy Schulte, 'a new form of enterprise service bus (ESB) infrastructure will be running in most major enterprises by 2005.' ESBs combine Web services, enterprise messaging, transformation, and routing to provide an integrat...

Thankfully, the myth that Web services standards begin and end with SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI is fast dissolving. Most developers now appreciate that mission-critical Web services must also extend to include standards in security, resource management, remote application access, choreography...

As the Web services market continues to shift and evolve in response to global accessibility needs and consumer demands, companies are continuing to extend and enhance their Internet-based services. Planning and following an integrated design process are invaluable in ensuring that a p...

How do you define a Web service? If you ask five people to give you a definition, you'll probably get at least six answers. Is a Web service any application that can be accessed over the Web, or is it limited to applications that expose a programmatic interface? Is it the code that imp...

The hype surrounding Web services mounts with every day. Dynamic composition of applications. Obsolescence of traditional applications. The claims escalate as technologists work mightily to craft compelling visions of disruptive technologies.

The hype around Web services has been deafening. Equally, there have been plenty of critics awaiting Web services' march behind other over-hyped technologies into the graveyard of 'The Next Big Thing That Wasn't.' However, when you look at the number of enterprises that have rolled out...

Since the king discovered that the coffers were bare, or at least shrinking, in 2001, IT spending for big ticket items has been in lockdown mode, while all the king's men work to put everything bought in '99 and 2000 together.

The emergence of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is an exciting development, providing a springboard for the advancement of flexible, dynamic distributed computing solutions. For those not familiar with SOAs, you can think of them as loosely coupled pieces of applications that ar...

Over the past year or so Web services has developed into the latest and greatest development craze. The Web services concept provides a strong impetus for current development of both of the major competing enterprise platforms - Microsoft's .NET and Sun Microsystem's J2EE. In the Java ...

Over the past couple of years, an idea has emerged (some might argue it's an old idea) that software will be transformed into being used as services, rather than as monolithic applications tied to a specific machine or platform. Rather than install software onto computers every time we...

One of the greatest challenges faced by Web services developers is the fact that the term 'Web services' isn't well understood outside the developer community. We've all experienced requests from product managers, customers, or salespeople who had no idea that connecting two disparate ...

IBM and Microsoft recently launched another Web services-related effort - the Web Services Interoperability Organization , or WS-I for short. Its charter is to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. I, for one, view intero...

WSJ's Industry Editor, Norbert Mikula, recently spoke with Dave Deutschman, chief technology officer of Quintessent Communications, headquartered in Seattle, WA., about their entry into the Web services market.

Have you played with SOAP yet? If so, which SOAP implementations have you used so far? Even though SOAP is on its way to becoming a standard, one thing you'll notice is that every SOAP implementation has a different programming interface. SOAP only defines the format of the messages th...

Security concerns, especially since the events of last Fall, are at the center of many industry discussions. Ever-increasing reports of hacker activities and security holes in well-known software products further fuel the debate, and rightfully so. Web services is a great new technolog...

I was quite amused by a series of articles talking about the battle between Java and .NET that appeared in mid-January. One article said that Java has a two-to-one lead over .NET based on an informal online poll. Meanwhile, in an article entitled 'Outlook: Java tech trends through 2004...

There are plenty of jokes regarding the world of standards development, from 'Standards are like sausages - you're better off not knowing how they were created' to the old-time paradox: 'The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.'