Web Services Architectures: Not Just Hype

When it comes to much-hyped Web services and the less-understood service-oriented architectures, solution providers say customers are starting to get it.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are the latest incarnation of the distributed object architectures of an earlier era.

"The easiest way for a nonspecialist to think of SOAs is in terms of processes and to realize that whatever process is expressed is not anchored, frozen or limited to a [given computer] screen," said Ken Dorsey, CTO of Integrated Warehousing Solutions, a solution provider in Downers Grove, Ill. "The service is expressed by the software in blocks of business logic that shouldn't be linked to a screen,pure, unvisualized logic," Dorsey said. "If you do it that way, the service can be provided to another piece of software, another application."

The separation of function from viewing device is critical because it gives customers more flexibility down the road. Today, the user device might be a desktop computer, but tomorrow it might be a handheld with pen input, and down the road, it could be some completely new gadget.

"It won't cost my customers downstream if they change devices," Dorsey said. "A few years ago, they might have been on OS/2 and NetWare, then [a] Windows 3-era [user interface], now BlackBerry or cell-phone 3G interfaces. Back in the day, the punch card was the [user interface]. Things change."

Web services, and their ability to link data from different applications and geographic locations, are fundamental here. The tech world has been inundated with verbiage from vendors about the worth of Web services, complete with the same one or two demos, for the past three years. But now there appears to be some reality behind the marketing.

Progress Software, Bedford, Mass., recently surveyed 40 of its top application development partners that plan to move their applications to an SOA. One-third said their customers had no preference when it came to the user interface, while one-quarter cited interest in Microsoft .Net.

More than half (56 percent) were going the SOA route to integrate legacy applications, 33 percent said they wanted to tie into non-Progress-based applications, and 17 percent said they wanted to link to partners beyond their walls.

Jeff Broadhurst, president of Apprise Software, a Progress partner, is equally bullish on Web services. "Being able to have the information in your corporate database available in realtime to different users [inside or outside the company] has real value," he said.

Apprise, Bridgewater N.J., makes software for wholesale distribution applications. "[Web services] lets us put that information out there so [users] can have realtime access in the look and feel they're used to," Broadhurst said.