Web Services

As Web services usher in new ways to build, deploy, and consume software, they will in turn demand new interfaces. The current method of accessing software from a big fat PC browser won't be entirely replaced any time soon, but as new devices interact with Web services, they will require more adaptable interfaces. One company already facing up to this realization is CareTouch, a Concord, Calif.-based division of Kaiser Permanente, which has built a Web service that helps its customers find the best price for medical needs not covered by Kaiser Permanente's insurance.

EPIC Global Technology on Tuesday unveiled support for Web services for the consumer packaged goods industry that leverages the e-commerce standards of the Uniform Code Council. EPIC's Global Pavilion for trading partners in the packaged food industry is designed to allow manufacturers to use an Internet browser to collaborate with any retailer the subscribes to UCCnet, a subsidiary of UCC that provides item registry and data synchronization based on industry-developed standards.

Web services and application integration technologies are moving full-speed ahead on their convergence course, and this week that destiny will ring truer than ever before. A bellwether of this phenomenon, Dublin, Ireland-based Iona Technologies, which made its name in EAI (enterprise application integration) software, will announce in San Francisco this week that it is reorganizing itself and is pulling every facet of the company together behind Web services. Iona is not abandoning EAI but banking on integration as a key piece of Web services, said John Rymer, vice president of product marketing at Iona's U.S. offices in Waltham, Mass.

There's light at the end of the tunnel through which the European IT industry is trundling, but it's not shining on the UK -- or on Web services vendors. That, at least, is the message coming out of Gartner's annual conference, the Spring Symposium and ITxpo, in Florence, Italy, on Monday. Even the weather helped put a damper on delegates' spirits, as the city is experiencing unseasonably heavy rain, according to Steve Prentice, vice president and director of research for Gartner.

Based on industry standards and application components, the emergence of Web services is breathing life into the long-heralded idea of reusing software code.And just as the Web services development framework creeps into the enterprise, an emerging marketplace is sprouting up to support the reuse of code, including hosted application development life-cycle services and prewritten component brokers.Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle in a couple of weeks will announce community code and collaborative development extensions to its Oracle Technology Network.

Web services are an unstoppable phenomenon that will change the future of software development, but consensus on emerging standards is needed first, an industry panel has agreed. About 300 people gathered at the Commonwealth Club of California to hear panelists discuss the state of Web services. One of the most dominant themes was the concept that Web services will drive the "second wave of the Web". "[The rise of Web services] is a phenomenon that takes advantage of a centerless Internet," said Steve Holbrook, IBM's technology evangelist for Web services, in Orem, Utah.

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday brought its Java enterprise server platform up to speed with emerging Web services standards, releasing a set of extensions that allow developers to build and run XML applications on the Java platform. The Java XML Pack is the first certified release of Web services tools for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the server software platform based on the Java programming language. Java developers already have some tools provided by the open-source community that allow them to build XML-based Web services for J2EE, said Karen Shipe, a product manager with Sun's Java XML group.

IBM and Microsoft announced a new, jointly developed standard -- called Web Services-Inspection (WS-Inspection) -- that aims to make locating Web services easier for users. WS-Inspection will allow users to discover what XML-based Web services are offered by various companies by checking those companies' Web sites, said Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy at IBM. Unlike other Web lookup standards like UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, Integration), which produces listing of Web services by category, whether the user is aware of the company offering them or not, WS-Inspection is a direct interrogation of a known company or provider, Sutor said.

The rising tide of Web services is leading to a battle among Microsoft's .Net framework, Sun's ONE (Open Net Environment) platform, and Linux for the allegiance and revenue from Web-hosting service providers. As part of its strategy, Microsoft is expected to continue developing tools for a service provider industry it views as a "great test bed" so it can gauge the application management, integration, and packaged value-add delivery nuances of Web services and .Net, according to Ted Chamberlin, a network analyst at Stamford, Conn.

San Francisco (IDG) -- This week's annual JavaOne conference will focus a lot of attention on so-called "Web services" and formal releases of code for a raft of new Java APIs. Sun has spent the past year beating the drums about Web services and in February launched the Sun Open Network Environment (ONE), a counter to Microsoft's .Net Web services scheme. Sun ONE includes a set of server software from Sun partner iPlanet and relies on standards such as XML and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

A cloud-computing company is building what it calls "the world's first zero-emission data center" in Iceland. The British company Colt says the data center will be powered fully by geothermal and hydroelectric sources of energy, which Iceland has in spades. The blog Earth2Tech, where we spotted this story, says Iceland could become a "magnet" for data centers because of the wide availability of renewable energy sources there. "Why is a country, which blipped on the global news radar in recent months because of its ash-spewing volcano and hard-hit financial markets, such a hot place to construct data centers that could house thousands of servers and run web services for Internet giants?"

Apple has dominated digital music sales for years with its iTunes store, which allows shoppers to download songs and other content. Now it's looking increasingly likely that the leading tech company will enter the growing music-streaming market as well. Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is close to completing deals with two other music labels, according to a report by tech news site CNET, citing multiple music industry sources. Such a product would throw Apple into direct competition with Amazon and Google, both of which recently launched cloud-based music streaming services of their own. Such services store songs on Web servers, where they are accessible from any device with an Internet connection, instead of on a user's hard drive.

Since he invented it more than 15 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has watched the Web change the way the world communicates, works and learns. He laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web in 1980 when he wrote a program called "Enquire" to help him organize his computer files with links. He later built on the idea and created a network of linked information that would be available to everyone across the Internet. Today, Berners-Lee directs the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, an organization dedicated to standardizing Web guidelines and components.

In cities where there are lots of nightclubs to choose from it is hard to know what the music is going to be like until you have paid and gone inside, but not any more. A new piece of software has been designed that will allow clubbers to check the playlists for different nightclubs on their mobile phone before they leave the house. The idea is the brainchild of an undergraduate team of students from the University of Sheffield, who have been working on the project for six months.

The rising tide of Web services is leading to a battle among Microsoft's .Net framework, Sun's ONE (Open Net Environment) platform, and Linux for the allegiance and revenue from Web-hosting service providers. As part of its strategy, Microsoft is expected to continue developing tools for a service provider industry it views as a "great test bed" so it can gauge the application management, integration, and packaged value-add delivery nuances of Web services and .Net, according to Ted Chamberlin, a network analyst at Stamford, Conn.

EPIC Global Technology on Tuesday unveiled support for Web services for the consumer packaged goods industry that leverages the e-commerce standards of the Uniform Code Council. EPIC's Global Pavilion for trading partners in the packaged food industry is designed to allow manufacturers to use an Internet browser to collaborate with any retailer the subscribes to UCCnet, a subsidiary of UCC that provides item registry and data synchronization based on industry-developed standards.

Developers in North America are gearing up for Web services and battening down the security hatches, according to the results of a survey released by Evans Data Corp. on Wednesday. However they are defined, Web services are the new must-have technology, said Jay Dixit, an analyst at Evans Data and author of the study. Dixit defined Web services as "Web-based applications that can interact with other Web-based applications using XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based standards. " These standards include SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

Neil Charney, director of Microsoft's .NET Platform Strategy Group, talked to the IDG News Service about a variety of topics related to Microsoft's .NET architecture for Web services, including security, application development, the recasting of Hailstorm, and the criticism that .NET will lock users into using Microsoft software. He spoke by phone from Microsoft's Latin America Enterprise Solutions Conference 2002 in Boca Raton, Florida, which ends Friday. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Microsoft moved to put two smoldering business problems to rest this week with the demise of its My Services initiative for consumers and the signing of a Web services security pact with IBM and VeriSign. The elimination of Microsoft's MyServices offering for consumers -- considered a potential competitive threat to its existing enterprise customers -- frees Microsoft to more aggressively market its XML technologies. Microsoft is expected to repackage the technology used in My Services to create the equivalent of an XML application server that will be tightly integrated with Windows XP servers.

John Seely Brown, the longtime chief scientist of Xerox, offered some outside-the-box thinking Monday on the much publicized but as yet largely unrealized Web services computing model. Brown said technology leaders need to step back from the growing complexity of their projects and look at some social and economic models to inform their thinking. "Seeing differently is a critical skill for tomorrow's chief technology officers," said Brown, speaking at InfoWorld's CTO Forum.