If you’ve invested heavily in the Web — dynamic content, personalized Web pages, extensive browser scripting, and site security — you might be wondering if Web services are even necessary for your business. After all, your Web presence probably didn’t come cheap (even if you used Linux and open source tools), and it meets all of your needs. After all, you say, interoperability is not a new ideal, and the features espoused by Web services are not revolutionary. So why adopt yet another technology?
What makes Web services promising and practical is infrastructure and standards. Given the pervasiveness of the Web and a handful of standards (for an overview of the prevailing Web services standards, see the accompanying article on page 22), it’s now tractable for any business to interoperate with any other business. That’s the promise of Web services.
And, as it turns out, the larger the investment you’ve made in the Web, the better suited you are to deploying Web services. Instead of replacing the technology you’ve worked hard to deploy, Web services can leverage it. Just think of Web services as another outlet for the expertise — code, servers, infrastructure, and bandwidth — you’ve already amassed.
Axis Powers
Apache AXIS (http://xml.apache.org/axis) is a substantial and comprehensive open source Java (and eventually C++) toolkit for building and deploying Web service clients and servers. Based on standards (HTTP, the Simple Object Access…
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