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Moving from the Web services to an enterpise service-based architecture: act now to expand your business capabilities.

Article Excerpt
Today's software industry is moving fast to supply innovative technologies, new standards, and early customer case studies targeted at fulfilling the vision of Web services. But as these products, standards, and customers emerge, it is now time to move beyond using the simple term Web services--it really misrepresents what is starting to take shape in today's enterprise, the emergence of the enterprise service-based architecture.

A Changing Landscape

Without a doubt, Web services are real in today's enterprise, primarily through the emergence and subsequent adoption of three important, agreed-upon technologies: SOAP, XML, and WSDL, considered the foundation for enabling Web services. However, if we look deeper inside the world of IT, we find other well-established and emerging technologies like Java, Enterprise JavaBeans, IMS, .NET, and CORBA. These technologies further establish the bedrock for a much more important phenomenon that is emerging--an enterprise service-based architecture that is built upon the foundation technologies of Web services. Java, Enterprise JavaBeans, CORBA, and JMS, in combination with SOAP, XML, and WSDL, are enabling this new enterprise service-based architecture. It's now time for the industry to stop focusing on describing and defining Web services and move toward describing and defining a service-based architecture for developing and deploying information systems. In addition, the vendor community should now focus on describing how their particular solutions fit into this new architecture and the benefits they deliver to today's enterprise information systems.

Filling in the Gaps

As enterprises begin developing an enterprise service-based architecture, much of their existing legacy code will need to be accessed as services to leverage the underpinnings of this new architecture. Existing code may have been built using Java or Enterprise JavaBeans, or invoked using message-based systems. The challenge is in enabling the chunks of software in a service-based architecture when you have to deal with different protocols or are concerned about the performance implications of interfacing, for example, your Enterprise JavaBeans through SOAP versus through a native call to the bean.

The good news is that development environments like Visual Studio and BEA WebLogic Workshop allow the rapid construction of Web services for new and existing code. In fact, many vendors are doing quite a bit to...