Web Services - traditional assumptions
written by gunther gerlach-2009
As web services technologies mature, and commercial-scale, service oriented architectures shift from early adoption to mainstream development, a new revolution of service orientation is emerging. Beyond the orchestration of web services in multi-party business processes, a dedicated treatment for procuring web services into different markets is coming into focus.
The first beneficiaries of open procurements of web services are ventures having successfully overcome the dotcom-burst such as Salesforce, StrikeIron, and GrandCentral. These companies leverage XML-based technology to consolidate enterprise application portfolios built by independent software developers for the small to medium markets. Their early successes are paving the way to long-anticipated Amazon/eBay-style marketplaces for web services.
For procurement of services in wider scale, traditional assumptions no longer hold. In larger marketplaces, consumers need a richer exposure of semantics in service descriptions and support of fuzzier search goals. In other words, if services are to be delivered independently, their non-functional properties, such as geospatial and temporal availability, methods of charging and payment, security, trust, rights, and penalties, need to be described in a systematic and precise manner. Furthermore, emerging web service usage scenarios, especially in marketplaces, are pushing the boundaries of coordination and the involvement of intermediaries and reusable service delivery components in end-to-end transactions. Thus, automated assistance will be required by prospective web services suppliers to integrate “instantly” their services with other services, with intermediaries, and with service delivery components. This is to name just a few of the challenges posed by the new frontier of service-orientation.
Published by. BPTrends November 2005
