Defining Web Services Is No Easy Task

Computerworld - Boston
One presenter at last week's XML Web Services One Conference drew a laugh when she told attendees, "Ask five people to define Web services and you'll get at least six answers."
Even though Web services has been one of the technology industry's hot buzzwords for some time, that doesn't mean a clear and succinct definition has emerged.
Here's a sampling of definitions that were tossed out last week:

• "Web services standards and technologies allow us to describe and deploy applications or services on a network in a consistent way so that they can be discovered and invoked in a secure and reliable manner. A Web service is an application that uses these standards and technologies." - Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy at IBM


• "What Web services are about is machine-to-machine communication. The base technology is XML and XML schema. If we want to narrow it to what types of Web service specifications are you going to be most interested in supporting - obviously SOAP, WS-Security, XKMS [XML Key Management Specification]." - Phillip Hallam-Baker, chief scientist at VeriSign Inc.


• "Any application that exposes information processing or serves up information in a reusable data format using common Web technologies." - J.P. Morgenthal, chief services architect at Software AG


• "Web services are loosely coupled software components delivered over Internet standard technologies. You must also use at least one of WSDL [Web Services Description Language], SOAP and/or UDDI [Universal Description, Discovery and Integration]." - Daryl Plummer, an analyst at Gartner Inc.


• "To me, when we're talking about a Web service, we're talking about taking some kind of application or series of applications and being able to make them available to people using the Internet as the transport, as the communications mechanism between the application which is calling and the other application which is responding to the call and delivering information." - Chet Ensign, senior director of architecture and development services at LexisNexis


• "It's important to cite SOAP, WSDL and UDDI as the core of any Web services definition, as they are the key protocols. I can create software to transport XML over a socket on the Internet, but is that an interoperable Web service? No, it is not. The most compelling part of Web services is interoperability and the low technical barriers to entry, which are in turn driven by standards." - Kevin Cronin, chief technical architect at Niteo Partners

Read more about web site management in Computerworld's Web Site Management Knowledge Center.