The open source initiatives have transformed the technical landscape by leaps
and bounds in the past two decades. It has gone a long way toward breaking
the stranglehold of monopolistic software companies over technologies. When
programmers have the ability to read, redistribute, and modify the source
code for a piece of software, the software evolves faster and better. It
happens at a speed that is way faster compared to the slow pace of
conventional software development.
Web Services and Open Source
Today there is a glut of choices for developers of software. The choices
extend from choosing operating systems to application development framework
components. The business enterprises are now harnessing the power of open
source by using ready-made open source components and frameworks. This helps
the enterprises save on development costs and also cut down on project ... (more)
Web services are gaining acceptance as the prime technology used to
interconnect disparate applications and ease interoperability between
heterogeneous and autonomous systems both for internal and external
integration. The variation of contexts in which shared Web services could be
used and the resulting variation in functional and Quality of Service (QoS)
requirements motivate extending Web services management platforms with more
sophisticated control mechanisms to cater to differentiated service
offerings.
However, most Web services platforms are based on a best-effort model, ... (more)
Most organizations that have tried have been successful in implementing a
pliable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Analysts have come out
with strategies to translate existing applications into SOA-compliant systems
using a staggered approach. The rewards reaped come in the form of low-cost
maintenance and agility in their business, along with reusable and
self-contained services. But there are still challenges in this form of
service-based architecture and solutions need to be devised.
One of the biggest hurdles has been coordinating technology-agnostic services
in... (more)
Web Service Description Language (WSDL) represents an IDL describing the
contract between the service requestor and the service provider in much the
same way that a Java interface represents a contract between client code and
an actual Java object. The crucial difference is that WSDL is platform- and
language-independent and used primarily (although not exclusively) to
describe SOAP services.
The WSDL 1.1 specification has been accepted at the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) and is the predominant version for describing Web Services today. At
W3C, work on the next generation of ... (more)
The authors are interning and/or working as part of the Web Services COE (Center of Excellence) for Infosys Technologies, a global IT consulting firm, and have substantial experience in publishing papers, presenting papers at conferences, and defining standards for SOA and Web services. The Web Services COE specializes in SOA, Web services, and other related technologies.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
