Comment 50% Meat, 50 % Filler (Score 2, Interesting) 222
As it stands now Web services are just the next step in the evolution to a platform-neutral, language-neutral distributed software environment. I see alot of M$ bashing going on, which is somewhat misplaced since some of the biggest backers of web services also happen to be M$'s biggest foes (read - IBM). M$ is however, trying to pull off one of their famous hijacks, with .NET. If they succeed it will be at least partly because of their competitors failure to take the initiative.
Getting back to web services though, they can possibly fill a niche in enterprise computing - and that niche is the ever-present, never fully solved question of how to tie together disparate platforms and software applications in a common enterprise environment. CORBA is the oft-quoted answer, but it is expensive to implement, and hard to get right. Wells Fargo has implemented an interesting solution for distributed programming using something they call Model Driven Architecture.
Looking at getting systems working together from an IT managers perspective, your always looking at the Big Two - time and money. 'How can I get this system working with my current resources in the least amount of time?'. The complement to that is 'How do we maintain and augment this solution once it goes into production without going through birthing pains?'.
The promise that Web Services is making to IT managers is that they will be able to lower their TCO and increase their ROI by cutting down on the number of changes they have to make to existing systems, while at the same time increasing their flexibility in adding new functionality. To others it makes the promise of providing services that can be metered and billed (wasnt that the promise of CORBA, EJB's, insert favorite distributed model here?).
Of course this is all a pipe dream until they solve some big issues, like security. Transaction management is not as important since web services can actually be implemented in any kind of language you want (read - Implement your own damn transactions).
However I think most IT managers will go blue in the face the first time their Fund Transfer web service is hacked because of a weak 56 bit SSL connection ;)
Getting back to web services though, they can possibly fill a niche in enterprise computing - and that niche is the ever-present, never fully solved question of how to tie together disparate platforms and software applications in a common enterprise environment. CORBA is the oft-quoted answer, but it is expensive to implement, and hard to get right. Wells Fargo has implemented an interesting solution for distributed programming using something they call Model Driven Architecture.
Looking at getting systems working together from an IT managers perspective, your always looking at the Big Two - time and money. 'How can I get this system working with my current resources in the least amount of time?'. The complement to that is 'How do we maintain and augment this solution once it goes into production without going through birthing pains?'.
The promise that Web Services is making to IT managers is that they will be able to lower their TCO and increase their ROI by cutting down on the number of changes they have to make to existing systems, while at the same time increasing their flexibility in adding new functionality. To others it makes the promise of providing services that can be metered and billed (wasnt that the promise of CORBA, EJB's, insert favorite distributed model here?).
Of course this is all a pipe dream until they solve some big issues, like security. Transaction management is not as important since web services can actually be implemented in any kind of language you want (read - Implement your own damn transactions).
However I think most IT managers will go blue in the face the first time their Fund Transfer web service is hacked because of a weak 56 bit SSL connection
