Editor's Letter 4•01/5•01

Web Software Services: The Next Silver Bullet?

The ability to tap into software services as components on the Web, the vision behind Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), is shaping up as the next major battleground between big industry players because of its potential to shift territories and create big winners and losers.

Today the engagement is primarily a marketing war with not enough specifics available about Microsoft's .Net, Sun Microsystems' ONE, and IBM's Web services for anyone to assess what they really mean, least of all IT decision-makers who will actually buy into one or another of these strategies. But the marketing wars precede the technology implementations, which will become more detailed later this year.

In essence the promise of Web software services is to speed application development and reduce application complexity, and thus lifetime costs. Discrete software services residing on the network are the evolution of low-level components familiar to object-oriented programmers. The relevant enabling standards include Enterprise JavaBeans, COM, CORBA, and XML. The big players forming up their interpretation of Web services include Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Sun, IBM, and Microsoft.

"At the end of the day, it will come down to SOAP as the standard interface to Web services," says Dan Potter, vice president of marketing for Progress Software's Sonic Software unit. The SonicMQ implementation of the Java Messaging Server spec, which is fundamental to the transport layer needed to implement reliable Web services, has been catching on by virtue of many OEM agreements. Some small tool vendors that offer SOAP enabling tools are emerging, such as San Diego-based Velocigen Inc., but it is hard to assess their future without knowing what the major players will bring to market.

The Object Management Group's newly articulated Model Driven Architecture is also worth considering in this context. The MDA initiative is an extension of OMG's purview to cover a more precise way of specifying software systems within design models, the goal being to lower lifetime software costs. "We all know the next silver bullet will not have to replace what we have now," says Dr. Richard Soley, OMG's chairman and CEO. "So we need an architecture to support the unexpected."

Because the OMG is a nonprofit membership organization including IT organizations as well as software and hardware suppliers, it should be more grounded in IT realities. The notion that software investments of the past can be protected as the world evolves to higher-level distributed computing in the form of Web services is very appealing. It is to Wells Fargo Bank, which has defined a platform and a language-neutral computing environment. "OMG's MDA approach is a validation of our direction," says Eric Castain, Wells Fargo senior VP of business object services. "The open industry format will greatly benefit us as we move forward into the future."

See Roger Sessions' column for more on this topic, and watch these pages and www.softwaremag.com for continuing coverage of Web software services and related movements.

Regards,

John P. Desmond

jdesmond@softwaremag.com

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