134 Broker Interactions for Intra- and Inter-enterprise
7.3.5 Advantages of Web services
Web services technology enables businesses to:
? Deliver new IT solutions faster and at lower cost by focusing their code
development on core business, and using Web services applications for
non-core business programming.
? Protect their investment in IT legacy systems by using Web services to wrap
legacy software systems for integration with modern IT systems.
? Integrate their business processes with customers and partners at less cost.
Web services make this integration feasible by allowing businesses to share
processes without sharing technology. With lower costs, even small business
will be able to participate in B2B integration.
? Enter new markets and widen their customer base. Web services listed in
UDDI registries can be “discovered” and thus are “visible” to the entire Web
community.
7.3.6 Disadvantages of Web services
Some Web services issues to consider are:
? Binding to Web services dynamically requires that the contents of the UDDI
registry be trusted. Currently, only private UDDI networks can provide such
control over the contents.
? The SOAP server footprint is significant and the technology is relatively new,
so adding the Web service provider stack to existing enterprise systems can
be a problem.
7.3.7 Comparing Web services with CORBA and RMI
There are often comparisons made between CORBA, RMI and SOAP, but such
comparisons can be misleading. CORBA and RMI are technologies describing
the whole communication process for publishing, finding, and invoking methods
on remote objects.
In contrast, SOAP describes only the format of the data exchange for
communication. Even the transport protocol is not compulsory. To understand
comparisons between these technologies it is important to realize that SOAP
does not cover the whole interaction process, as the other technologies do.
There are a lot of articles on the Web describing the pros and cons of using one
of these technologies. One aspect worth further consideration is object
references. In SOAP Web services there are no object references! This basic
characteristic of SOAP has far-reaching consequences for the programming
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.