came across this, does it make sense?
Web services:
The web services promoted by microsoft requires a lot of collaborations from every end to be successful.
The various players collaborating to set it up would be:
1) Web services providers.
2) UDDI.org
3) Web services client.
For web services to be popular one has to figure out who will benefit from it and how beneficial is it so that they will adopt web services and spend financial resources behind it.
Some of the core areas where it would help a lot would be:
1) Any organization having data that gets used heavily by other organizations or individuals.
For eg: Whenever a car insurance company prepares an insurance policy for a customer, he may check the driver record or vehicle record information which may be available on different central server in the country or state.
Imagine the scene with web services, driver records and vehicle records are exposed as web services
An insurance representative opens a form and enters driver id and vehicled id, and submits it, he gets back the driver and vehicle record info from the web services.
2) Similarly, foreign
exchange rates can be exposed as web service.
3) Stock market rates can be exposed as web services
And many similar things.
The difference with web services is that it provides a way of programmatic interaction while plain web sites displaying the information used to provide only manual interaction.
Looking at the concept behind web services, it’s the same thing what B2B applications does.
For example: If bank A wants to communicate to Bank B that a person P had made a money transfer from bank A to bank B, it was being done by a B2B application mutually set up between these organizations.
Thus inter bank transactions could take place without much manual intervention.
Similarly you can find B2B doing the same thing on online market places where businesses try to sell and buy stuff for the best price.
The differences what web services brings compared to B2B is that “web services” is based on open standards, like XML,SOAP,UDDI etc by which everyone will be on the same page while earlier B2B technologies uses proprietary stuff among the partners, or if it’s a online market space then everyone has to conform to the online market technologies.
How will web service help “Business to business “areas?
Lets assume that a company called ‘X” sells ready made clothes and wants to purchase raw material i.e. clothes from A mills, B mills, C mills. And all these mills have web services that expose the raw material and price info and these mills web services are registered at uddi.org.
So when a purchase officer at company “X” pulls up web based form and enters data for “purchasing 100 yards of polyester cloth” the data gets converted to xml format, and a request is send to uddi.org where it figures out which companies deals with selling clothes as per the data specified. Once it gets the information regarding the companies it sends a web service request to each of these companies web service server.
Each companies web service server responds with xml data describing the price for the clothes. Thus the purchase officer will get a list of prices from different vendors and he can get the best deal.
The above scenario looks good. But each module has to be researched to see whether its really does as promised without involving major financial and other resource constraints.
Imagine how the purchase officer would work without web service, he will have to go to each companies web site and manually figure out the prices. First of all he may not know that how many companies are ready to sell, secondly he may not visit all the websites and even if he visits he may not get what he want and many such issues. OR he will have to go to a B2B online market place to figure it out.
Companies would like to provide web services because that’s one another way of marketing their stuff. Because companies which use web site as a marketing plus purchasing place, will definitely like to install web services as it allows users or business’s to interact with them via programs rather than manually
And if once any company installs a web service, there will be a mad rush from its competitors to do the same.
It would be like the net boom where every company rushed to build its website. And the future company server will have a normal http web server for manual interaction plus web services for program interaction.
But the boom will depend on many factors , the net boom happened because computer penetration increased drastically and also it became easier and cheap to access the internet.
Web services boom will happen if there are not many roadblocks in the following three areas:
1) web service client
2) uddi.org registration and information access.
3) Web service providers.
Another restraining factor that looms large is security, not every web service data should be exposed to every one and there should be some authentication before access.
If you look from a single user perspective how will web services help me, this would be like a user has many needs such as his income is in the bank, he need to rent or buy a house, buy a car, car insurance, buy groceries, buy clothes.
Lets say there’s a webservices portal(something like hotmail, yahoo which are free for users) where users can login and fillup forms belonging to each of the categories ( For eg in the bank form he can specify his bank name, in the house form he can specify what type and price of house he is looking for, etc) and whenever he triggers these forms, a request is made to the corresponding web services and information is retrieved. For eg: if he submits the bank forms the request goes to uddi.org and locates the web service address of the bank, contacts it and retrieves information regarding the latest interest rates provided by the bank.
And the information retrieved will be specific depending on the parameters filled in the form rather than getting a whole lot of stuff when one browses through a web page.
The microsoft .net my services seems to works differently, it appears that it considers its hotmail user base as a service and exposes it to business.
Implementing a web service client interacting across various domains would probably involve extensive work and it seems that it would be better handled by webservices portals rather than individual organizations.