posted by Kaarthik on Friday, June 09, 2006
The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web - O'Reilly XML Blog: "When it comes to the Semantic Web, you might call me a disillusioned advocate. I've been dipping in and out of the technologies for the last 5 years or so, but am increasingly frustrated by the lack of any visible progress. This entry should be regarded as constructive criticism of the Semantic Web - I still believe in it, but need to bring the flaws (as I see them) in to the open, in the hope that discussion and communication is the first step towards resolving problems."
posted by Kaarthik on Sunday, April 23, 2006
Business Intelligence Searches for Emerging Trends: "The emerging role of business intelligence systems is to alert decision-makers proactively about critical situations. This requires a number of search capabilities that are not usually associated with inferences and predictions based on the data in standard relational databases, much less standard query and reporting tools that form the bulk of business intelligence applications. The key to detecting future business opportunities lies in the ability to organize and search vast quantities of both structured and unstructured information, such as call center notes, repair orders, contracts, images and audio and video files, buried within siloed business systems."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Web Services At A Crossroads : "Web services, in the context of the evolving Web, may well provide the next revolution in how businesses and people use technology. I see a shift away from installation and products, as seen in enterprise-SOA efforts. Instead, I see the focus on people and processes-how customers or employees use the technology-becoming more important. And this emphasis is where the real value of Web services will lie."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Toward converging Web service standards for resources, events, and management: "HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft have published a roadmap to describe ongoing work to reconcile and converge currently overlapping standards and specifications. The result will eventually provide an industry-wide set of standards for resources access and eventing that will be useful for many scenarios in management integration, manageability, and grid computing. "
posted by Kaarthik on Monday, February 20, 2006
Federated Service Management: "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a key strategy for IT and line-of-business executives to jointly enhance business performance and agility in today's intense corporate climate. Using the SOA methodology, business applications are built as an assembly of loosely coupled pieces of business functionality, commonly referred to as services. These services are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a shared services network, which is often highly distributed within and across enterprise boundaries."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, February 10, 2006
FastSOA: Accelerate SOA with XML, XQuery, and native XML database technology: "Many SOA implementations rely on message formats defined with XML. The resulting message schemas can become complex, incompatible, and difficult to maintain, and can cause serious scalability and performance problems. In this article, Frank Cohen describes a new strategy and techniques for accelerating SOA performance through the use of XML, XQuery, and native XML database technology in the SOA mid-tier."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Modeling Web Services Choreography with New Eclipse Tool: "Choreography is the dark continent of Web services: few onlookers have traveled there, and many question whether there are any riches to be brought home from the trip. In the first place, choreographies bear such a striking resemblance to business processes that the novice might think that the two types of artifacts are indistinguishable. "
Whipping IT data into shape: "In most organizations, the tough slog of codifying interfaces and reconciling distributed data models is long overdue. But today, with the majority of large organizations pushing ahead with some sort of SOA initiative, the natural inclination to avoid this ugliest of hairballs can no longer be sustained. "
Semantic Web tools to make friends: "EU-funded VIKEF project has developed a software framework to build semantic services and knowledge management applications to help fair and conference organizers and users. And these semantic technologies will also be used for e-learning or for better searches through scientific papers and other articles."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, February 03, 2006
FAWS for SOAP-based Web services: "Use a portable system called FAWS (FAult tolerance for Web services) to provide a client-transparent fault tolerance for Simple Object Access Protocol- (SOAP) based Web services. As Web services continue to increase in demand for application solutions and with the number of players entering the Web service arena rising, the ability of Web services to guarantee full availability of the service in the presence of failures becomes critical. However, most of the existing fault-tolerant systems for Web services do not provide fault tolerance for transparent handling of requests whose processing was in progress when the failure occurred."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, January 12, 2006
Masters of the Semantic Web :: Bio-IT World: "I see a huge amount of energy from people in the life sciences getting excited about the Semantic Web and what it can do to solve the big IT problems... But also the people involved in the Semantic Web pushing it along are also very excited about getting involved in the life sciences it's one of those areas that affect humankind, finding drugs, curing AIDS and cancer, etc. There seems to be a huge energy, and lots of practical technical reasons why this area is crying out to be one of the flagship areas that the Semantic Web really takes off..."
posted by Kaarthik on Sunday, December 25, 2005
SOA Web Services And Best Practices For .NET WebSphere Interoperability: "Managing mixed-mode systems is an intricate affair, made even more difficult by the additional layers of complexity that are added for interoperability. In this article we reviewed the various methodologies that are available to allow for interoperability and their impact on the complexity of the system. We explored the various solutions in the context of their impact on fault management, configuration management, accounting management, security, and interoperability. In addition, Platform Unification was shown to have a great impact on reducing the complexity of mixed-mode systems and positively affecting the management of the system."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, December 23, 2005
Web 2.0 The Global SOA: "Web 2.0 is really the Global SOA, available to the whole world today. Don't forget that it will also be connected to your local SOA in ways you will need and are barely beginning to suspect. Be prepared to leverage Web 2.0 and SOA, and reap the enormous benefits of these emerging mindsets and toolkits."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, December 21, 2005
JBI - A Standard-based approach for SOA in Java: "With the whole industry aligning more and more towards open standards and specifications, JBI takes a great leap in enabling Java technologists adopting a standards-based approach in addressing integration issues using service oriented architecture and ESB infrastructure. Both commercial vendors like Oracle and open source software like ServiceMix have already started adopting JBI as part of their ESB offerings. "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, December 16, 2005
Streamline SOA development using service mocks: "Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can greatly accelerate application development, namely through reusable services and through applications that require less new code because they can rely on those reusable services. SOA can also greatly complicate application development, as teams need to work concurrently on different parts of the application and yet successfully put the pieces together at the end. This paper explores what makes SOA development difficult and offers a process to simplify it. With this process, an organization can greatly increase its success with SOA."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, October 20, 2005
The Semantic Organization: Knowing What You Know @ SYS-CON FRANCE: "There are a number of tools on the market that support one or more of the areas required for a semantic organization. However, they tend to be special-purpose tools that require extensive setup. The process of tagging, storing, and retrieving documents should be built into the tools that we use every day. It should be a basic part of what everyone does."
posted by Kaarthik on Saturday, October 01, 2005
Start Making Sense: Get From Data To Semantic Integration: "BI and data warehousing, weighed down by limited perspectives about how to integrate information, must be adjusted. The tonic is semantic integration and ontology, which blend data with richer meaning and context"
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, September 02, 2005
WS-BPEL Extension for People – BPEL4People: A Joint White Paper by IBM and SAP: "Although different bodies have worked to define interoperability standards for processes, including the user interaction with processes, this paper examines how interoperability can be pursued with respect to the BPEL language, which defines business process behavior based on Web services. Rather than defining a new standard for the user interaction, this paper shows that an extension of the existing standard can be achieved and is worth undertaking. A specification of BPEL4People that defines its syntax and semantics will follow."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Hapner on Java Business Integration: "JBI makes an initial cut at how the community can cooperate on implementing a Java platform ESB. If you don't think ESBs are important for the Java platform, I think you'd be in the minority from the vision perspective in how the Java platform needs to evolve to support its developers. "
Hapner on SOA and the global computing model: "As developers, we don't worry about the details of TCP/IP. In previous lives we didn't get worried about the internal details of a MOM [message-oriented middleware] protocol. We worried about how we used those in a larger context. I'm sure there were features of MOM systems that the MOM folks felt were core elements that were never actually exploited by the developers because they decided that they didn't actually need those features. I think the same thing will happen with Web services. We don't really know how that will all work out, but there are likely aspects of Web services protocol that will be ignored by developers and some that will be critical.. "
Hapner on SOA and the global computing model: "As developers, we don't worry about the details of TCP/IP. In previous lives we didn't get worried about the internal details of a MOM [message-oriented middleware] protocol. We worried about how we used those in a larger context. I'm sure there were features of MOM systems that the MOM folks felt were core elements that were never actually exploited by the developers because they decided that they didn't actually need those features. I think the same thing will happen with Web services. We don't really know how that will all work out, but there are likely aspects of Web services protocol that will be ignored by developers and some that will be critical.. "
posted by Kaarthik on Monday, August 29, 2005
It's not Google or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Semantic Web: "Not me. I don't worry about it anymore. Google can keep on improving on the ways that people find data. Meanwhile, I will continue to use Semantic Web technology to help automate how machines query data."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, August 26, 2005
Enterprise Architecture: The Holistic View: The Role of Semantics in Business: "if you start with capturing the business processes and business rules, you will eventually run across a rule that makes you backtrack and have to redevelop processes and rules you've already developed. In most cases, the semantic capture process follows the 80/20 rule in that 20 percent of your most heavily used processes will contain 80 percent of your vocabulary. Once these terms are mapped into an ontology you will be able to quickly identify the dependencies, which will lead to less redevelopment of your processes and rules downstream. Moreover, the rules and processes can be developed more quickly and by less technical staff if they have a palette of business terms to work with rather than a set of software functions."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The Role of Web Services in Mergers and Acquisitions: "Web Services is commanding more attention in software development. Established leaders like IBM (Web Sphere) and Microsoft (.NET) continue to push their offerings, and other vendors are making Web Services their development focus. For example, SAP has made Web Services and other open technologies the focus of its development efforts for its enterprise service architecture (ESA), which serves as the foundation of SAP�s NetWeaver product. The more software developers integrate Web Services into their application suites, the more prominently Web Services will participate in merger integration."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, July 15, 2005
Toward a Pattern Language for Service-Oriented Architecture and Integration, Part 1: Build a service ecosystem: "As the IT industry matures, we will witness the emergence of more and more successful designs and implementations of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). We will also encounter challenges that appear to be recurring in slightly different forms but fundamentally have the same underlying problems. We also tend to repeat solutions with slight variations. To address this, the following patterns have arisen in the context of projects involving Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service-Oriented Integration (SOI). These projects have focused on the migration, modeling, design, and implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture and in the loosely-coupled integration enabled through services, which is termed Service-Oriented Integration. In this series, we will share these patterns and experiences related to their use. We will provide guidance on how to use them in combination to help solve commonly encountered problems in the migration, modeling, design, and implementation of SOA and SOI."
SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 1: Introduction to the IBM SOA programming model: "The IBM programming model for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables non-programmers to create and reuse IT assets without mastering IT skills. The model includes component types, wiring, templates, application adapters, uniform data representation, and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This is the first in a series of articles about the IBM SOA programming model and what is required to select, develop, deploy, and recommend programming model elements. The content presented here takes into account that developers come to this model with different skill levels and roles."
SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 2: Simplified data access using Service Data Objects: "Take advantage of Service Data Objects (SDOs) to simplify data access and representation in your service-oriented software. SDOs replace diverse data access models with a uniform abstraction for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting business data used by service implementations. This is the second article in our series on the programming model for the IBM® Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)."
SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 3: Process choreography and business state machines: "One approach to service composition is to define services as business processes using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) or represent them as business state machines. The mainline code orchestrating the invocations of a series of such services runs in a special container called a process choreography engine. Container-provided functions enable long-running process executions that can even span enterprise boundaries, survive planned and unplanned outages, and facilitate business-to-business (B2B) collaboration."
SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 2: Simplified data access using Service Data Objects: "Take advantage of Service Data Objects (SDOs) to simplify data access and representation in your service-oriented software. SDOs replace diverse data access models with a uniform abstraction for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting business data used by service implementations. This is the second article in our series on the programming model for the IBM® Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)."
SOA programming model for implementing Web services, Part 3: Process choreography and business state machines: "One approach to service composition is to define services as business processes using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) or represent them as business state machines. The mainline code orchestrating the invocations of a series of such services runs in a special container called a process choreography engine. Container-provided functions enable long-running process executions that can even span enterprise boundaries, survive planned and unplanned outages, and facilitate business-to-business (B2B) collaboration."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, June 14, 2005
BPEL and Java: "BPEL is an important language for the process-oriented approach to SOA. Because BPEL has been designed specifically for definition of business processes it provides good support for various specifics of business processes such as support for long running transactions, compensation, event management, correlation, etc. BPEL is well suited for use with the J2EE platform and many BPEL servers build on top of J2EE. With ideas of combing BPEL and Java (BPELJ), and WSIF, the usability of BPEL is even increasing."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Comparing Web Service Performance: WS Test 1.1 Benchmark Results for.NET 2.0, .NET 1.1, Sun One/ JWSDP 1.5 and IBM WebSphere 6.0: "The XML Mark 1.1 Benchmark Kit demonstrates that major improvements have been made with . NET 2.0 over the . NET 1.1 runtime for XML parsing. These improvements will impact both client and server programs that do any amount of direct XML manipulation. Furthermore, the results indicate that . NET 2.0 performs significantly better than the latest Sun Java 1.5 platform in XML parsing scenarios. We encourage customers to download the XML Mark 1.1 benchmark kit and test the scenarios for themselves."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Semantic Elephant: Part 1, The Elephant is Real: "I can assure you without a doubt, that the software our children write will indeed be led by a semantic guiding light, grounded in semantics, ontology, inference and not constrained by our current syntactic data processing plight."
Semantic Elephant: Part 2, The Elephant Has Many Parts: "If we become more capable of describing the network of data in our businesses, we can become more efficient at using what we already own - perhaps even discovering things we didn't know we knew. More pragmatically for CFOs and comptrollers amongst us, ontology-driven data networks can serve to highlight regulatory, audit, and compliance risks that typically lurk in email chains, Word documents, and spreadsheets."
Semantic Elephant: Part 2, The Elephant Has Many Parts: "If we become more capable of describing the network of data in our businesses, we can become more efficient at using what we already own - perhaps even discovering things we didn't know we knew. More pragmatically for CFOs and comptrollers amongst us, ontology-driven data networks can serve to highlight regulatory, audit, and compliance risks that typically lurk in email chains, Word documents, and spreadsheets."
posted by Kaarthik on Monday, May 30, 2005
From Web Services to SOA and Everything in Between: The Journey Begins Highlights: "Web services are maturing, if somewhat slowly and haphazardly. As the underlying standards congeal and the technology matures, more and more companies are likely to move towards Web services. The prospect of integrating disparate systems will likely continue to be the major driving force behind the deployment of Web services, with the prospect of opening up information sources playing an important secondary role. The flexibility of Web services continues to be demonstrated in the growing variety of applications of the technology across all industry boundaries. "
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Three Minutes to a Web Service: "A key aim of JAX-RPC 2.0 (JSR 224) is to simplify Java Web service development. Currently in early draft review stage in the JCP, an early access JAX-RPC 2.0 reference implementation is available from the Java Web services community site on java.net. This article provides a brief preview of writing a JAX-RPC 2.0-based Web service with that reference implementation, and highlights how Java annotations simplify Web service development. "
JAX-RPC 2.0 renamed to JAX-WS 2.0: "This was done for a number of reasons, but the main reasons are:
1. The JAX-RPC name is misleading, developers assume that all JAX-RPC is about is just RPC, not Web Services. By renaming JAX-RPC to JAX-WS we can eliminate this confusion.
2. JAX-RPC 2.0 uses JAXB for all databinding. This has introduced a number of source compatibility issues with JAX-RPC 1.1 because the bindings are different. The migration from JAX-RPC 1.1 to JAX-RPC 2.0 is not cookie cutter as generated Java code and schemas will be different than those generated by JAX-RPC 1.1. Although the renaming does not ease this migration, it does let the developer know that these are two separate technologies, hence the more difficult migration is more palatable.
3. Maintaining binary compatibility with the JAX-RPC 1.1 APIs, was hindering our goal of ease-of-development. Because we had this binary compatibility requirement, many legacy APIs were exposed such as the various methods on javax..xml.rpc.Service and the javax.xml.rpc.Call. Having these legacy APIs around would confuse developers. By renaming JAX-RPC 2.0 to JAX-WS 2.0 we no longer have this binary compatibility requirement and we can rid the APIs of these legacy methods and interfaces and we can focus on a new set of APIs that are easier to understand and use.
"
1. The JAX-RPC name is misleading, developers assume that all JAX-RPC is about is just RPC, not Web Services. By renaming JAX-RPC to JAX-WS we can eliminate this confusion.
2. JAX-RPC 2.0 uses JAXB for all databinding. This has introduced a number of source compatibility issues with JAX-RPC 1.1 because the bindings are different. The migration from JAX-RPC 1.1 to JAX-RPC 2.0 is not cookie cutter as generated Java code and schemas will be different than those generated by JAX-RPC 1.1. Although the renaming does not ease this migration, it does let the developer know that these are two separate technologies, hence the more difficult migration is more palatable.
3. Maintaining binary compatibility with the JAX-RPC 1.1 APIs, was hindering our goal of ease-of-development. Because we had this binary compatibility requirement, many legacy APIs were exposed such as the various methods on javax..xml.rpc.Service and the javax.xml.rpc.Call. Having these legacy APIs around would confuse developers. By renaming JAX-RPC 2.0 to JAX-WS 2.0 we no longer have this binary compatibility requirement and we can rid the APIs of these legacy methods and interfaces and we can focus on a new set of APIs that are easier to understand and use.
"
Web + Services: "There's obviously more that can be said of both the 'Web' angle as well as the 'Services' angle, but hopefully enough is here to recognize the distinction between the two. We have a long ways to go with both ideas, by the way. Interoperability isn't finished just because we have XML, and clearly questions still loom with respect to services, such as the appropriate granularity of a service, and so on."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags: "This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled 'Ontology Is Overrated', and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled 'Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification.' The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, May 12, 2005
Processing Request/Response Messages of a Web Service Using the Handler Chain: "Web Services are all about processing messages. Handlers are classes that act as pre-processors and post-processors of these messages. A series of Handlers can be invoked in some order. This series of Handlers is called a Handler Chain. The order of invocation is determined by deployment configuration and also whether it's on the client or server side."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Evolution Of Web Search: "It's not too early for businesses to start thinking about the semantic Web, or to begin experimenting with tagging their corporate documents and files. Companies who don't understand how best to handle the data that is their lifeblood risk slowly bleeding to death. '[Executives] have to say this is important,' says Linden. 'They have to understand it.' "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, March 17, 2005
Knowledge: The Essence of Meta Data: When Meta Data Galaxies Collide: "The semantic Web would really be nice, except for a few small problems. First, how do you get the cow back in the barn? Are any of the 90 billion pages currently in existence going to convert to XML, RDF and other semantic technologies? And, are those people that wouldn't take the time to properly tag their content in simple metatag format, now going to try to figure out how ontology frameworks work? The reality is that the meta data information on the Internet is more of a social issue than a technical one."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, March 11, 2005
Do we need the Semantic Web? - ZDNet UK Insight: "For years the Semantic Web has been a much-deride pipe dream. Now it's starting to come together and is being championed by the W3C we ask the question: do we need it?"
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, February 24, 2005
Work with Web services in enterprise-wide SOA, Part 2: Maximize external Web services interoperability: "Maximizing external Web services interoperability between multiplatform SOAs requires planning ahead of time to set the limit for how many SOAs can be developed. You should communicate with a team of business analysts and IT specialists on various performance issues. You will find that resolving interoperability issues will make your job of developing applications much easier. You can develop external Web services, each of which can use a different platform and request protocol. The analysts will find that resolving the issues will make their job of designing and analyzing a system of multiplatform SOAs much easier. They can determine on which platforms Web services can run without incurring SOA overload. "
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't: "Google's director of search quality discusses challenges of automation, knowledge, spam, and even politics."
Was the Universal Service Registry a Dream?: "It is sometimes beneficial to stop what you're doing, take a look around, and see where you've come from and where you are going. This regrouping is taking place right now across the software industry and is focused on the problem space of Web service description, discovery, and integration. At a high level, this article briefly discusses the progress made to date at solving the problem, describes the benefits and shortcomings of current technology, and presents a vision of the possible future of Web services infrastructure"
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, December 16, 2004
alphaWorks : Ontology-based Web Services for Business Integration: "ntology-based Web Services for Business Integration is a semantic Web services proof-of-concept demonstration for the industrial sector that shows service discovery, composition, and business process transformation. It supports the infrastructure for next-generation, semantic Web services middleware that enables business process integration, including business-to-business (B2B) exchange. It is a demonstration of technology that can facilitate enhanced discovery, composition, and transformation of business processes through semantic enablement and intelligent agents. "
alphaWorks : IBM Web Services Navigator: "IBM Web Services Navigator is an Eclipse/RAD (Rational Application Developer) plug-in for interactive visualization of Web service transactions. IBM Web Services Navigator addresses the complexity of understanding and debugging complex collections of Web services, such as those found in Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, by visualizing the actual execution of Web service transactions. The plug-in visualizes logs of Web service activity from IBM WebSphere Application Servers collected by a Web service data collector, a companion technology to be released separately. "
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Web Services Journal: "It is sometimes beneficial to stop what you're doing, take a look around, and see where you've come from and where you are going. This regrouping is taking place right now across the software industry and is focused on the problem space of Web service description, discovery, and integration. At a high level, this article briefly discusses the progress made to date at solving the problem, describes the benefits and shortcomings of current technology, and presents a vision of the possible future of Web services infrastructure."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, December 02, 2004
Service-oriented modeling and architecture: "This article discusses the highlights of service-oriented modeling and architecture; the key activities that you need for the analysis and design required to build a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The author stresses the importance of addressing the techniques required for the identification, specification and realization of services, their flows and composition, as well as the enterprise-scale components needed to realize and ensure the quality of services required of a SOA."
posted by Kaarthik on Monday, October 18, 2004
Florida courts look to Semantic Web for disparate data on desperados- ADTmag.com: "Getting data from all those sources seems like a job for the Semantic Web, the latest invention of W3C founder and director Tim Berners-Lee. Semantic Web technology, including the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF), ontology specifications and other XML-based standards is intended to allow searches of disparate data. So it should work in hunting down disparate data on desperados. "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, September 16, 2004
XML.com: Uncle Sam's Semantic Web: "From the EPA to the Navy, the United States government is coming to see the Semantic Web as a solution to huge data-processing problems. XML.com columnist Paul Ford gets the scoop at the 2004 Semantic Technologies for e-Government Conference."
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
XML Web services security best practices | Tech News on ZDNet: "There may be a misconception is that XML Web Services security is an all or nothing proposition requiring the installation of advanced, complex applications or the ratification of many standards. As XML Web service deployments continue to rise, many organizations will need to augment and tailor these security best practices to meet individual needs. But there exists today pragmatic, field-tested practices to XML security that enables enterprises to capture the cost cutting, revenue driving benefits promised by XML Web services."
Web Services Eventing (WS-Eventing): "The WS-Eventing specification defines a baseline set of operations that allow Web services to provide asynchronous notifications to interested parties. WS-Eventing defines the simplest level of Web services interfaces for notification producers and notification consumers including standard message exchanges to be implemented by service providers that wish to act in these roles, along with operational requirements expected of them."
Tour Web Services Atomic Transaction operations: "Explore how transactions work in one common and classic form to preserve data integrity, and apply that classical transaction description to the operations of the new Web Services Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) and related Web Services Coordination (WS-C) specifications. Mapping classical to Web services transactions helps you discover that Web Services Atomic Transactions embodies age-old common industry best practices for one kind of transaction."
Berners-Lee Calls For More Voice Apps: "World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee is challenging developers to do more with voice recognition systems and spur a sector that is ripe for innovation. "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, September 10, 2004
EContentMag.com: "'Web services' is an umbrella term for services that take place over the Web, use Internet protocols, and may or may not involve the use of a Web browser. Toufic Boubez, CTO of Layer 7 Technologies, a Web services firm headquartered in San Mateo, CA, says that the term is a bit of a misnomer and not nearly powerful enough to convey the strength of the broad array of services under development."
Implement and access stateful Web services using WebSphere Studio, Part 5: "The Web Services Resource Framework (WS-Resource) defines a family of specifications for accessing stateful resources using Web services. Web services, by their nature, typically do not maintain state information during their interactions. However, their interfaces must frequently allow for the manipulation of state, that is, data values that persist across, and evolve as a result of, multiple Web service interactions. In WS-Resource, state is modeled as stateful resources and the relationship between Web services is codified in terms of an implied resource pattern."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, September 02, 2004
XML Web services security best practices - News - ZDNet: "There may be a misconception is that XML Web Services security is an all or nothing proposition requiring the installation of advanced, complex applications or the ratification of many standards. As XML Web service deployments continue to rise, many organizations will need to augment and tailor these security best practices to meet individual needs. But there exists today pragmatic, field-tested practices to XML security that enables enterprises to capture the cost cutting, revenue driving benefits promised by XML Web services."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, August 27, 2004
The On Demand Operating Environment: "The On Demand Operating Environment is based upon the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA views every application or resource as a service implementing a specific, identifiable set of (business) functions. In addition to the business functions, services in an on demand environment might also implement management interfaces to participate in the broader configuration, operation, and monitoring of the environment. This article provides an introduction to the On Demand Operating Environment."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, August 13, 2004
Performance patterns for distributed components and services, Part 2: "Part 2 of this article continues the discussion on distributed designs by the means of a shopping cart example. This example is quite simple, but still powerful enough to provide important insights into good and not so good practices. It shows that keeping the communication coarse-grained by reducing the number of remote calls is a good practice. It also proposes an ID-lists pattern to combine multiple remote calls into one."
Elements of Service-Oriented Analysis and Design: "Experience from first Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation projects suggest that existing development processes and notations such as Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD), Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks, and Business Process Modeling (BPM) only cover part of what is required to support the architectural patterns currently emerging under the SOA umbrella. Thus, there is a need for an enhanced, interdisciplinary service modeling approach."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, August 12, 2004
IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Creating a Web Services Gateway cluster: "The Web Services Gateway (WSGW) serves as a mediator between a Web service requestor and a Web service provider. The WSGW can be clustered in WebSphere Application Server V5, but this requires some additional assembly, since Web services is not part of J2EE 1.3. This article describes the steps to create a WSGW cluster and use the WebSphere Application Server HTTP server plug-in for work load management of Web service requests."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, August 06, 2004
Performance patterns for distributed components and services, Part 1: "The more applications evolve into networks of interacting components and services, the more important it becomes to consider the potential performance issues that typically arise from such distributed architectures. The execution time of certain functions or methods is certainly still important, but the communication time between distributed components now gains influence in terms of its affect on performance considerations"
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, August 05, 2004
Propagating Security Context Across a Distributed Web Services Environment: "It's a problem as old as networked computing. Consider two applications. They negotiate a level of trust. How can that trust - or security context - be transferred to a third application, one that may exist in an entirely different security domain from the first? "
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Turn EJB components into Web services: "Web services have become the de facto standard for communication among applications. J2EE 1.4 allows stateless Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components to be exposed as Web services via a JAX-RPC (Java API for XML Remote Procedure Call) endpoint, allowing EJB applications to be exposed as Web services. This article presents a brief introduction to JAX-RPC, outlines the steps for exposing a stateless session bean as a Web service, and provides the best practices for exposing EJB components as Web services."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, July 23, 2004
Improve your SOA project plans: "Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has the potential to vastly improve IT's efficiency. But to implement one at an organization, you need more than just technical know-how: you have to be skilled in management as well. In this article, Yvonne Balzer outlines governance principles that can help turn any SOA engagement into a success."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Giants pressured to submit Web services specs to OASIS: "Fearful of fragmented security standards and implementation incompatibilities, one research group is putting pressure on Microsoft and IBM to submit their Web services security specifications to standards body OASIS. "
Web services Programming Tips and Tricks: WSDL file imports: "Import statements are easy, right? Just about every programming or interface language has them; and if you're reading this tip, you probably know everything there is to know about imports. So, why should you read a tip about Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file imports? For one thing, two types of import statements exist: XSD imports and WDSL imports. For another, their respective behaviors are not quite identical. Lastly, it's a good idea to know the relationship between the two."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Marines In Iraq Find Battlespace Information Faster With Content-Based Network From Semandex: "A new content-based network from Semandex(TM) Networks, Inc., of Princeton, NJ (www.semandex.net), developed under a National Technology Alliance (NTA) program for the U.S. Marine Corps, is helping Marines in Iraq find and distribute crucial battlespace information several times faster, according to Marine Corps intelligence officials and the NTA (www.nta.org). "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, June 17, 2004
Web Services Integration Patterns, Part 1 : Desing patterns applied to Web services domain.
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Taking Web Services to the Next Level: "Yankee Group analyst Dana Gardner suggests that the adoption of Web services has reached a plateau. 'In the enterprise, companies are investing in Web services tools and infrastructure, but they now need services to enable content provision on the Web and control of their data.' "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, April 30, 2004
Semantic Mapping, Ontologies, and XML Standards: The key to managing complexity in application integration projects: "The use of the ontologies concept within modern application integration techniques and technologies seems to be a good match. Indeed, today we are already leveraging certain aspects of ontologies within most application integration projects, whether we understand the concept or not. The value here is to recognize ontologies as a concept that formalizes the management and integration of information, services, and processes ... formalizing something we are already doing informally. The real significance of ontologies leveraging the reusable aspects is within vertical domains where the use of common metadata, services, and processes has the most value. Once we get semantics under control within vertical systems (more often, a collection of systems), application integration or linking a common set of semantics to back-end systems won't be as daunting as this process is today. What's more, the application of standards such as Semantic Web and OWL will make ontologies that much more attractive. "
Extend JAX-RPC Web services using SOAP headers: "In this article, the author examines how JAX-RPC SOAP handlers process SOAP message headers. Specifically, he shows how a handler adds a SOAP header to an outgoing message and how a corresponding handler removes the SOAP header from an incoming message. In addition, he presents the JAX-RPC programmatic configuration and deployment models as they relate to this topic."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, April 23, 2004
Python Web services developer: Python SOAP libraries, Part 5: "Python Web services developer: Python SOAP libraries, Part 5"
Service-Oriented Architecture expands the vision of Web services, Part 1: "Today's Web services implementations are typically simple and often similar to a client-server model. However, platform-neutral interchange is supported, which allows a diverse range of client implementations to interact with new or legacy code as server functions. Much has been written about the technologies that make such applications straightforward to implement. It is now time to look at the bigger picture of what we can do with them. The author addresses the question of how to move forward from simple models to those that represent real-world business models of arbitrary complexity. "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, April 16, 2004
Standardize annotations with Web services: "Annotation is the process of associating metadata with data. This article presents a Web services API intended as an industry standard for client-server systems designed to facilitate the structured annotation of heterogeneous data. The author presents the goals of the Annotation Web services API and then discusses how those goals motivate the data model around which the API operates. The author also discusses methods that comprise the API including two examples of possible sequences of API calls to create and retrieve annotations."
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Will Web Services Players Get Along Now?: "'At a certain degree, if your company is J2EE and .NET [based], and nothing else, do you really need Web services?' Neward said. 'I would argue not necessarily,' when open source alternatives and ORBS for .NET are available and 'give you that binary remoting capability but without any of the concerns of lofty conversions between XML and objects and back again.' "
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, April 13, 2004
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, April 09, 2004
From P2P to Web Services: Addressing and Coordination [Apr. 07, 2004]: "Organizations are facing new technological challenges, often finding them perplexing or even insolvable, as they modernize their use of the Internet and intranets. But the common element which these problems share is that their solutions go beyond technology. These problems require a social infrastructure, a framework that determines whether or not technological change is successful. This article summarizes what researchers and standards committees are doing in tentative attempts to create that infrastructure."
IBM Sees SOAs, Web Services Snowballing: "After years of hashing out standards and acquiring various software bits, IBM is looking to extend its technology for Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to its massive services division, company officials told internetnews.com recently. "
The hidden impact of WS-Addressing on SOAP: "The WS-Addressing protocol might not seem like much at first glance. But it establishes message information headers that will make new Web services message flow patterns possible -- and that's something that will have a profound impact on SOAP engines and the future of the SOAP protocol itself."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, April 02, 2004
Best Practices for Web services, Part 12: Web services security, Part 2: "Both XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption will have an impact on your solution. If performance is your primary concern over all other requirements, then HTTPS is your best choice. A common practice today is to use XML Digital Signatures for application authentication and data integrity and to rely on HTTPS to provide confidentiality. Whether the impact of using both XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption is trivial or significant can only be determined by enabling this capability within your application environment using real business data and business logic, and then measuring the differences. "
Best Practices for Web services, Part 11: Web services security, Part 1: "Conducting business in today's world usually requires that a company utilize the Internet for both business-to-customer and business-to-business interactions. Often, the information exchanged in business transactions is mission-critical, market-valued, or confidential; thus, while traversing the Internet, it must be protected from accidental access or deliberate unauthorized control and use. Understanding the mechanics of how WS-Security works and the options it affords in a service-oriented architecture can enable you to make the best selection of security technology to address your requirements for authentications, data integrity, and confidentiality."
Web Services Addressing: "Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) provides transport-neutral mechanisms to address Web services and messages. Specifically, this specification defines XML elements to identify Web services endpoints and to secure end-to-end endpoint identification in messages. This specification enables messaging systems to support message transmission through networks that include processing nodes such as endpoint managers, firewalls, and gateways in a transport-neutral manner."
Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange): "Web services use metadata to describe what other endpoints need to know to interact with them. Specifically, WS-Policy describes the capabilities, requirements, and general characteristics of Web services; WSDL describes abstract message operations, concrete network protocols, and endpoint addresses used by Web services; XML Schema describes the structure and contents of XML-based messages received and sent by Web services. "
Web Services Resource Framework: "The Web Services Resource Framework defines a family of specifications for accessing stateful resources using Web services. It includes the WS-ResourceProperties, WS-ResourceLifetime, WS-BaseFaults, and WS-ServiceGroup specifications. The motivation for these new specifications is that while Web service implementations typically do not maintain state information during their interactions, their interfaces must frequently allow for the manipulation of state, that is, data values that persist across and evolve as a result of Web service interactions. "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, April 01, 2004
Services-oriented architecture gains support - News - ZDNet: "To jaded technology users, SOAs may seem like slapping a fresh label on existing products. But as more and more corporations launch services-oriented architectures, this latest incarnation of middleware, combined with smart design, may end up being more than simply old wine in a new bottle. "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, March 19, 2004
A new approach to UDDI and WSDL: Part 4: Publish from Java using the new OASIS UDDI WSDL Technical Note: "In the first article in this series (see Resources for links to Parts 1, 2, and 3), you learned about a new approach to constructing a UDDI model of a WSDL description. The second article described the types of UDDI query this new approach enables, with examples of several queries given in the form of UDDI V2 API requests. The third presented a more complex example than the one in the Technical Note, including screenshots showing you how to publish the UDDI entities and how to construct the types of query described in the Technical Note and in Part 2.
In this fourth article, you'll see some sample Java code that will publish WSDL descriptions to UDDI programmatically. The fifth article in the series will describe how to write a Java application that can issue the queries described in the other articles in this series, using UDDI4J."
In this fourth article, you'll see some sample Java code that will publish WSDL descriptions to UDDI programmatically. The fifth article in the series will describe how to write a Java application that can issue the queries described in the other articles in this series, using UDDI4J."
posted by Kaarthik on Sunday, March 07, 2004
Semantic Web Interest Group: "The Semantic Web Interest Group, as the successor group of the RDF Interest Group, was 'designed as a forum to support developers and users of Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL'. Dan Brickley, as chair of the SWIG, chaired the two day meeting, which included presentations, lightning talks, and open discussions. "
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, March 05, 2004
Today's Portals "Inadequate" for Web Services?: "A stunning report from web services analysts Zapthink for portal developers predicts that today's web-based portals will prove 'wholly inadequate' to meet the needs of emerging standards-based, loosely coupled, distributed applications. The solution, the study says, will come from rich clients (plug-ins or new OSes), which will let portal users customize their on-screen experience and even optimize their workflow tasks -- all without requiring server side developers to change a thing at their end. "
Integration and Web Services Market Assessment - Analyst Corner - CIO: "Integration technologies comprise the technologies that enable disparate software systems to exchange information. This includes technologies for connection, guaranteed message delivery, message queuing, message/document transformation, application-specific adapters, rules-based workflow for messages, and general business process management related to integration. "
Microsoft, IBM Top Off Web Services Metadata Spec: "Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems and SAP have wrapped up their specification for defining messages to retrieve specific types of metadata associated with a recipient. The spec, Web Services Metadata Exchange for Service Endpoints (WS-MetadataExchange), is the latest stone along the vendors' roadmap to define unity and clarity of purpose for Web services, which allow applications to talk to one another. "
posted by Kaarthik on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
OASIS Sets Path to ‘Dataweb’. Effort would link, synchronize data: "The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) in February began the second phase of work on what it hopes will be a Web that can not only link data, but also synchronize it. The new Web, which OASIS refers to as the "Dataweb", would provide a way to publish/subscribe to information."
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, February 26, 2004
Using service-oriented architecture and component-based development to build Web service applications: "This paper provides a deeper understanding of service-oriented architectures, relating services to software components and describing how component-based development practices provide a foundation for implementing a service-oriented architecture."
posted by Kaarthik on Friday, February 20, 2004
Web services performance considerations, Part 1: "Successfully optimizing performance for Web services is part experience, part art, and part discipline in being systematic in your approach to measuring criteria, analyzing information, and making sound adjustments. First, you must make good decisions during your architectural and design phases as described above. Then once you have a solution that is operational, it is an iterative process to fine tune your solution by capturing measurements from simulated loads and making adjusting and measuring again to understand their influence. "
posted by Kaarthik on Thursday, February 19, 2004
Wings for Web Services, Via HP: "In a bid to extend its 'adaptive enterprise' services strategy into the mobile arena, Hewlett-Packard is releasing a Web services tool and is hooking up with Ericsson on a mobile telecom platform. "
W3C brings Semantic Web closer to reality: "'This is an extension to the current Web,' Miller said. 'We're not designing the Semantic Web to replace the [current] Web. It's not that in January 2005 we'll turn the current Web off and turn the Semantic Web on. But rather [the goal is] to layer and weave meaning into the current Web to make it a more effective place where people can share, reuse and recombine the data that they're creating.' "
posted by Kaarthik on Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Microsoft, Intel Forge New Web Services Spec: "Microsoft, BEA Systems, Intel and Canon issued WS-Discovery to extend Web services architecture to computing and peripheral devices that are normally not reachable through Web services. Schmelzer also said WS-Discovery will be complementary to the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP), standard, which helps music and other digital entertainment content to be accessed from various devices in the home without regard for where the media is stored. UPnP will be used to let systems know when devices are available for direct communication, while WS-Discovery will be a way to let an entire network know about the services that are available on that device."
posted by Kaarthik on Monday, February 16, 2004
W3C Delivers Standards for the "Semantic Web": "In announcing the final approval of both technology recommendations, RDF and OWL, the efforts of the W3C to enhance the availability of machine-understandable data on the Web has moved into a new era. A core principle of the W3C is that the Web can only reach its full potential when data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as it is by people. Guided by a vision of the future where data on the Web are defined and linked so they can be used by machines, not just for display purposes, but also for automation, integration, and reuse of data across various applications, these technologies will help ensure the possibility of a bright future for intelligent (and intelligible) information on the Web. "
posted by Kaarthik on Saturday, February 14, 2004
Q&A: Tom Glover, IBM and WS-I Web Services Exec: "Tom Glover wears two Web services hats: senior program manager, Web services standards for IBM; and IBM director, president, and chairman of the board within the Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) Organization. Glover chatted about his roles and the harried state of Web services internetnews.com during a recent conference in New York. "
Googling for XML: "Whether you're interested in RDF or any other kinds of XML, the presence of this freely accessible, constantly updated, massive index of XML files known as Google is quite a resource. Combining the techniques shown here with others in the book 'Google Hacks' gives you a lot to play with. "
2004 - The Year Web Services Go Mainstream - Editorials: "Microsoft Releases MapPoint Web Services 3.5; Intergraph & MapInfo add Web Services to desktop products; ESRI continues to build the Geography Network & ArcExplorer; and MapQuest continues to build mindshare while pushing deeper into the enterprise. "
Web services inside the firewall: "XML and Web services aren't just external e-commerce tools - they can also revolutionise the way in which internal applications are stitched together"
Composition and Management of Web Services: Development that makes a good symphony: "Web services management standards like OASIS WSDM are absolutely crucial to the long-term success of Web services, especially given the clear trend toward more complex B2B and electronic marketplaces based on a service-oriented architecture. The donation of WS-Manageability by CA, IBM, and Talking Blocks to the OASIS WSDM TC is an excellent example of the continued awareness and dedication on the part of major management software vendors toward supporting composable, open Web services specifications as the cornerstone of a manageable SOA. "
W3C Wraps Up Semantic Web Standards: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tuesday passed two key standards for helping computers get more information out of the applications they are processing and match content more appropriately for end-users. "
