Web Services

Web services are a means of achieving integration and business agility quickly while also laying the foundations for an SOA. Web services offer significant benefits in their flexibility, ease of use, and reuse as well as providing a way to develop an SOA incrementally, although an SOA contains more than Web services.

Technically, the term "Web services" describes a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol backbone. In other words, Web services are the technologies that enable making connections among heterogeneous software components that each perform a discrete business function (for example, an inventory checking function), called "services." By adding a Web-services-based interface to these services, they can communicate and interoperate to perform a complex business process (for example, an order processing application).

Commonly, however, "Web services" is also used for the services that are thus connected. In other words, a Web service is a modular software component that uses a standard Web interface to communicate with other software containing Web service interfaces.

Either way, the power lies in these standard interfaces. The software components themselves may be created from scratch or from existing applications and information, by breaking them down into discrete business functions. As a result, the Web service components themselves may be heterogeneous, written in different computing languages for different operating systems and platforms.

No matter. An application requesting a Web service (consumer) only needs to know the details of the interface, not how the service is implemented — enabling the creation of loosely coupled applications defined only by the points at which they communicate.

Consequently, a business process that includes or consists of Web services can execute across heterogeneous computing resources and integrate diverse, distributed systems, both internal and external to an organization. Just as important, Web services can be shared, that is, flexibly reused by different programs. As a result, Web services reduce IT costs and development time and leverage an organization's existing technology investment by reusing legacy system functionality and integrating diverse, existing computing resources.

Web Services: Management & Security Issues

As Web services proliferate and different business processes share the same service, however, they give rise to management challenges and security risks because of their heterogeneous implementations; their connections across multiple departments and, even, enterprises; and, in many cases, their exposure on the public Internet.

Because Web services are loosely coupled and reused in diverse business processes (by a wide range of consumers) across heterogeneous systems, there is no inherent way to monitor performance and understand service interactions and dependencies. As a result, it's difficult for IT administrators to:

• Spot and analyze the root cause of variations in performance, to detect and resolve issues
• Find and control rogue services to keep sensitive information out of the hands of unauthorized consumers and ensure systems aren't overloaded with unplanned users
• Enforce service-level agreements (SLAs) and provision services to meet specific consumer needs in order to align IT with the business
• Ensure consistent security enforcement across services subject to differing security requirements and standards in different uses—and avoid having something fall through the cracks.

These are not trivial issues. For example, failures in managing Web service performance and availability can result in lost revenue and productivity and penalties for violating SLA. Failure to enforce the right type of security on a Web service may expose sensitive information and even violate important rules, such as the European Union privacy laws.

Web Services: Management Solutions from Progress Actional

Progress® Actional® products offer comprehensive SOA management solutions that enable organizations to capture the benefits of Web services and SOA, beginning with small, simple deployments of Web services, and to support their reuse and expansion as the network of shared services grows into an enterprise-scale SOA. At the same time, the Actional product family provides solutions that allow organizations to address the operational and security challenges and risks mentioned here, with negligible management overhead and without coding to achieve end-to-end business process monitoring.