EAI The Framework Behind Web Services Integration

Standardizing connections between systems is critical for efficiency. We've all heard of Moore's Law stating that processing power doubles every 18 months, but you may not have heard of Gilder's Law that network bandwidth doubles every 6 months. This leaves us with an environment in which connectivity gains grow three times faster each year than processing gains. When compounded annually, available bandwidth continues to accelerate and encourages the use of distributed computing in the infrastructure to utilize the 'edges' of the computing infrastructure. We can see this distributed computing trend by simply looking at the history of computing - we've moved from mainframes to client/server to n-tier computing to Web applications and now to Web services.

The concept of Web services has certainly taken the technology industry by storm, having now gained as much - if not more - attention as its predecessor in standards-based technology, XML. From the technology-savvy developer to the Wall Street- savvy financial analyst, Web services are being discussed as a silver bullet for solving the persistent challenges of integration. In the midst of all this hype, and in anticipation of the widespread adoption of Web services, the staying power of e-business and application integration (EAI) solutions is constantly being questioned. This articlewill demystify Web service standards and clarify their role within an enterprise integration strategy.

According to "Application Integration Thriving Among Standards" from Gartner in July 2001:
Standards are important, but they will neither eliminate the persistent difficulty of heterogeneity nor eliminate the need to integrate application systems through hard work and robust integration middleware technology.

Web Services 101: No Rocket Science Here
Before an organization makes a considerable investment in utilizing Web services, it must have a clear understanding of what Web services are and what business and technology value they can bring to streamlining operations. So, let's start with a simple definition:

A Web service is an application that adheres to new connectivity standards (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) that are based on more mature Internet standards (HTTP and XML). This standards-based connectivity allows a Web service implementation to dynamically discover and interact with other Web services automatically.

So, in its simplest form Web services standards enable applications to dynamically advertise their own capabilities, search for other applications on the network, and then invoke their services without prior design or negotiation. Just as people use Web pages to manually interact with Internet applications, systems will use Web services to automatically interact with Internet Applications.

Web services standards can drive value today by increasing interoperability to lower the cost of integration between systems. Going forward, entirely new value propositions will be created as Web services standards are widely adopted to enable applications to dynamically discover each other on the Internet and exchange data.

Tools of the Trade: Web Services Connectivity Standards
Enabling standardized system connections requires that everyone adopt the same protocols, or sets of rules. The foundation of these protocols is now in place and higher-level protocols are emerging. The promise of Web services' eventual success lies in the widespread adoption of these existing standards.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): A simple XML-based messaging protocol for calling a Web service, typically using HTTP transport

WSDL (Web Services Description Language): An XML-based language for documenting what a Web service does, where to find it, and how to access it

UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration): A directory standard for registering Web services that users and systems can find and use

As these standards mature over the next decade, they'll have a substantial impact on enterprise infrastructure for several reasons. Foremost, as Web services standardize connectivity between systems, they'll drive interoperability and abstraction that will lower integration costs, increase corporate agility, minimize vendor lock-in, and enable best-of-breed deployment strategies. As they're based on mature standards like HTTP and XML, they're relatively simple for developers to adopt and less costly to deploy. Finally, we know that Web services standards will have an impact, as there is such widespread acceptance and adoption of these new standards among software vendors.

Why Are Web Services Increasingly Important?
To understand the value that Web services can really bring to an organization, one must uncover the real-world business challenges that they can help organizations overcome. Industries such as manufacturing, financial services, telecommunications, and utilities will stand to benefit most immediately from the use of Web services, as they are each faced with fragmented supply chains where standardized connectivity between business partners is currently limited, yet critical for maintaining competitive differentiation.

Enabling real-time responses to changing business conditions, Web services offer implementation simplicity, firewall neutrality, and independence from implementation technology. Web services standards effectively predefine communications between applications to remove the need for new connectivity decisions to be implemented for each project. Using Web services, the interfaces to new applications can be readily reused by other applications in an organization or selectively offered to its business partners.

It's easy to see the impact of these benefits in Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration solutions. For example, accessing Web services from suppliers for product pricing, availability, and order management, as well as exposing these same functions to customers, can greatly increase the visibility and efficiency of an organization's supply chain. Similarly, within a CRM solution Web services can support easy alerting of order status information to any device, bringing the customer closer by improving the service provided. It's important to note, however, that Web services standards are not necessarily enabling capabilities that weren't possible prior to their existence. Rather, all these example e-business initiatives could be performed using XML over HTTP, but would simply take longer to implement and cost more over time, as there were no assurances of interoperability and reuse.

With these opportunities in mind, we're just starting down the road of the recent Web services movement and the continued evolution toward common connectivity standards. Standards maturity and mainstream adoption are still several years away. However, faced with these emerging standards and varied options, global organizations can take action now to implement a strategic architecture to allow them to leverage existing investments while rapidly taking advantage of future advances.

EAI 101: The Framework Behind Web Services Integration
Web services standards are a welcome enabler for efficient system-to-system connectivity; however, the current standards leave many questions unanswered when it comes to meeting enterprise integration needs, such as data transformation for interaction with complex back-end systems, guaranteed messaging, business process management, trading partner and protocol management, transactional integrity, and security.

"Web Services: Platforms and Tools," a METAGroup presentation in February 2002, said:

"Web services ease integration, but their current state does not replace existing EAI functionality. Web services tooling won't solve integration problems any more than Microsoft Word solved writing problems."

EAI technology provides an open, extensible framework for connecting applications within or between enterprises. EAI solutions ensure compliance and interoperability through open messaging, open queuing, open development tools, adapters (applications, Web, e-commerce, communications, legacy, generic) and data standards (XML, EDI, HL7, Swift) across all major platforms.

As an addition to existing connectivity options (such as Java Messaging Service, FTP, SMTP, HTTP, RMI, CORBA, and API access), Web services standards offer a valuable new real-time connectivity path to use in integrating systems. EAI frameworks have evolved over the past decade to lower the cost of integrating systems by providing an integration framework that is open to existing and future standards and technologies. The goal is for the integration framework to provide a standards-based integration platform that operates across heterogeneous environments and then insulates the end user's integration work from changes in standards, operating system, application versions, and so on.

Within an EAI framework, Web services integration will exist at both the adapter and the business process level. Adapters provide communications and data transformation capabilities to enabling rapid integration into packaged, legacy and custom applications. Any of these applications can in turn access a Web service or be called by a Web service through a SOAP Messaging Adapter to Web service-enableing these existing applications. The adapter performs the hard work by mapping the existing system into the Web service interface.

At the business process level, Business Process Management (BPM) solutions are used to control the flow of business process activities across the systems and users involved. BPM solutions typically offer process modeling, implementation, monitoring, management, and process optimization services to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Web services can be called as needed from any activity within a business process, and in turn, a larger business process can be exposed as a Web service to be called by other systems or partners. The value of Web services in this context is in standardizing the interfaces in and out of the business process.

The Future of EAI and Web Services
Every organization's technology infrastructure is a complex and heterogeneous environment, and the vision of a comprehensive end-to-end e-Business solution based entirely on standards that are universally supported on every computing platform is far from reality. Following the earlier hype cycle driven by XML, organizations realized that although XML is a very effective format for exchanging data, it is not the panacea that was promised for all integration challenges.

Faced with today's rapidly evolving standards and ever-increasing demands for business agility, global organizations require a strategic architecture that allows them to both leverage existing investments and to take advantage of future advances. Web services offer a nondisruptive model for extending and enhancing existing applications without forcing any wholesale replacements. EAI proved to be the top IT spending priority among CIOs, as noted in the February 2002 Morgan Stanley independent CIO survey. With that momentum, it continues to allow information to work harder and smarter, increasing the speed of business reaction time and facilitating seamless, straight-through transaction processing.

Web services will similarly drive great efficiencies across deployments by removing unnecessary connectivity friction between implementations, but this is not where the greater challenges lie. Creating and managing flexible integrations between systems that deliver value to the enterprise is the hard work, and requires robust application integration capability, trading partner/protocol management, and business process management all running securely on a scalable, reliable, distributed, yet centrally managed, platform.

EAI platforms have adopted these new systems-connectivity standards to lower integration costs for customers, and will continue to both guide and adopt new standards for systems connectivity and integration as they are developed. Contrary to the positioning of some people that Web services will replace EAI software, the reality is that EAI will simply continue to evolve to lower the cost of integrating systems.

Author Bio
Alex Andrianopoulos is vice president of product management for SeeBeyond. He is responsible for guiding and managing the product management team in the development and execution of a cohesive product strategy plan, further strengthening SeeBeyond's technological leadership in e-business application integration. alexa@seebeyond.com and info1@seebeyond.com

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