Web Services: A Personal Viewpoint Rakesh Agrawal IBM Almaden Research Center
What are Web Services? Independent computational units Published functionality and interfaces Discovered and invoked remotely from other services and programs
Why the hype? Parallel/incremental development Cross language/platform Plugability/composability/scalability
Déjà vu all over again? It’s possible that Gnutella has walked the earth before. It’s tricky to determine what’s brand-new, but this is for certain: Gnutella is the successful combination of many technologies and concepts at the right time. Gene Kan, Gnutella & GoneSilent.com Replace “web services” for “Gnutella” in the above quote?
Difference from CORBA: Loose-coupling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Client Server
Difference from CORBA: Loose-coupling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Swordfish Client Server Robert M. Pirsig Bantam Books
Standards: A Mute Point De facto standards will emerge, soon! Will standards be open? technically best? That obvious will happen is not obvious!!!
Research Issues B2B and e-commerce have become passe’ True promise of web services lies elsewhere Middleware for data-intensive intranet applications World wide sharing of computing resources World wide distributed intelligence
Intranet SOA Acceleration in the rate of technological changes have made the traditional requirement & specification driven software development model obsolete Systems are never done; they continuously evolve But internet SOA need fine-tuning Warning: Shameless self-advertising follows
An Application built using Vinci
Building a MyVinci Page
Results Empirical evidence that it can work: 30+ person project using Vinci for infrastructure active users of another fielded application within IBM Further info: R. Agrawal, R.Bayardo, D. Gruhl, S. Papadimitrou. Vinci: A service-oriented architecture for rapid development of web applications. WWW-10. Hongkong
Resource Sharing World wide sharing of computing, storage, and bandwidth Motivation: Charity: e.g. Greed: Auctioning of unused CPU cycles, disk storage, DSL bandwidth at xbay.com Paradox: Greed models are harder to build and deploy
Next Web: World-wide distributed intelligence Premise: Individuals have something valuable to share Evolve from the current “a few producers and a large number of consumers” to “everyone is a producer as well as a consumer” Sharing not limited to static documents
Data Management Opportunities Services offered by individuals is the data How to describe, search, rate, access, compose, price them?
The true delight is in the finding out, rather than in the knowing Isaac Asimov