Re: RE: potential users of web services

One thing that is very important to me in the definition of web services is the recognition of the universality, ubiquity and simplicity of the http protocol as a practical solution to integrate applications over internet.. 
A bussiness oriented arquitecture  that profits from the success of the IP and the web.   A great idea that was obvius but that was not realized before.  An intelligent proposal to contruct an operational model for system development.  Specifically web services are emergent standars based in  a services oriented components arquitecture.
The use of "web" in the name is a matter of marketing, we could said good marketing :-)

I'm sorry I didn't catch this thread from the beginning, having been away from my office last week and just catching up on my email! Having sort-of "been there at the creation", let me first say that, in my mind, the term "Web Services" is a very unfortunate misnomer, since a definition of a "Web" service doesn't really require the Web. It was just a marketing buzzword that some people who shall remain nameless came up with at the time. In my group at IBM, when we were hammering out the details of UDDI and other Web Services components, it was called Service Oriented Architecture, and I'm sure Andrew Layman can tell us that it was probably also called something else at Microsoft.

Having said that, my view of web services is that it's any platform- and implementation-independent software (or even functionality, although you can always wrap functionality such as pizza baking in a software interface!) that can be:

* described using an agreed upon or well known description language (for example WSDL is nice but not required)
* published to an agreed upon or well known registry (for example UDDI is nice but not required)
* discovered through an agreed upon or well known mechanism  invoked over the network through its declared API

I usually add "composed with other services" but that's somewhat circular! Now, you'll see that there's no mention of XML, SOAP, etc. These are wonderful and extremely useful standards (the "agreed-upon or well known" part) but nothing prevents an internal (within the firewall) implementation consisting of C programs listening on sockets and sending binary data whose format is well-known and described in the organization to be labeled "Web Services".

I realise that this view might differ a bit from the "accepted" view, considering that the "Web Services Architecture Stack" consists of XML and Schema at the bottom of every layered cake, so I might make an exception for XML. But nowhere is it suggested that the other components such as SOAP or UDDI are required.

Thoughts??

  --  Toufic

Toufic I. Boubez, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Saffron Technology
1600 Perimeter Park Drive, Suite 300
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boubez@saffrontech.com 

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"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is"


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Layman [mailto:andrewl@microsoft.com] Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 3:40 PM
To: www-ws@w3.org
Subject: RE: potential users of web services


Private mail to me suggests, and I agree, that the definition could be slightly improved as:

A Web service is a computational service, accessible via messages of definite, programming-language-neutral and platform-neutral format, and which has no special presumption that the results of the computation are used primarily for display by a user-agent.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Layman [mailto:andrewl@microsoft.com] Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 12:29 PM
To: Mark Baker
Cc: www-ws@w3.org
Subject: RE: potential users of web services

I believe that the services you cite fit my definition of Web service quoted below.  I could perhaps be more concise: 

A Web service is a computational service, accessible via messages of definite, language-neutral and platform-neutral format, and which has no special presumption that the results of the computation are used primarily for display on a user-agent. 

Hope this works for you.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 12:03 PM
To: Andrew Layman
Cc: www-ws@w3.org
Subject: Re: potential users of web services

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:10:46AM -0800, Andrew Layman wrote:  The term Web service was created to contrast with two earlier  technologies.  On the one hand, it identifies a distinction from "Web  site" in that a Web site serves pages, typically in HTML, for display in
> a browser to a human, whi

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Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 08:33:57 UTC