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Web Services: The New Internet? posted by Peter J. Patsula

Hype or Gold - Jumping on the Bandwagon

WEB SERVICES consist of a collection of standards and protocols that enable client applications to communicate to server components over the Internet using the HTTP protocol. The most important of these are: XML, UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP.

So, what does this really mean?

Essentially, the vision of Web Services is to allow computers around the globe to communicate with each other automatically, exchanging information, and hopefully, when the standards and security issues are resolved, exchanging MONEY.

For many experts and Web visionaries, Web services will revolutionize e-commerce. Although for the most part, the front end of the Web will remain the same, the back end, where all the processing takes place on servers and databases, will never be the same.

For most of us who use the Web, this doesn't mean much initially. But for the bean counters, it means being able to charge Micropayments for all kinds of transactions ranging from information queries to database updates.

As a Web user, Web services might mean that in the future I could be paying 0.1 cents for each search query I perform on Google or three cents for each article I read from Yahoo. This doesn't sound too promising for users. But as an entrepreneur, it sounds like a gold mine.

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Problems with Web Services
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Of course this "gold" won't be so easy to mine for a number of reasons:

PROBLEM 1
**********
Establishing standards has not been easy. You think it would be easy for everyone to get together and agree upon a standard so people could make more money. But it's not so simple. He who controls the standards is more likely to get a bigger piece of the pie.

PROBLEM 2
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Security problems. Automatic micropayments are easier said than done. Computer geeks are eagerly waiting for this new technology to take root so they can figure out a way to hack into it and make a bundle.

PROBLEM 3
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Consumer acceptance. Both businesses and consumers will be hesitant to accept a service that empties their bank account automatically. There was enough resistance to using credit cards over the Web.

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Where the Real Money Is?
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Web Services may eventually irritate us Web users, demanding micropayments for services we now expect to be free, however the real money will be made in meeting the needs of the business world, i.e., saving infrastructures money for transactions that normally require extensive paperwork and repetitive personnel tasks.

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How to Get Started with Web Services
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If Web Services technology grabs your interest and you think there is money to be made here, you need to do five things:

-1-
***
Take an XML course (start by getting a good book: try xml.com).

-2-
***
Learn about UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP protocols (try w3schools.com).

-3-
***
Take at Visual Studio ASP.NET course and get the software so you can test your applications on your home computer (Microsoft Visual Studio).

-4-
***
Come up with an idea that enables you to charge micropayments to customers who are willing to accept these payments (i.e., it saves THEM money).

-5-
***
Forget about your social life for the next five years as you struggle to master the coding and stay ahead of the competition.

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Web Services Quotes from the Industry
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“I'm no better at clairvoyance than most industry forecasters, but I would advise IT budget overseers to take their cues from some of the world's most established corporations, which are investing significantly in Web services.”
--Mark W. Vigoroso, EcommerceTimes Columnist

“Web services are a distributed computing architecture that features the use of loosely coupled applications that perform services for one another. They feature a new way to perform program-to-program communications that allow applications to communicate with each other regardless of which application language was used to create an application—and regardless of what systems platform and operating environment is being used.”
--Joe Clabby, Sep. 2002

“Most of today's market leaders are those companies who had the foresight to recognize the changing landscape in today's modern business world. The new business 'battle ground' has been very cruel to those companies that have fallen behind the information curve.”
--Futurevisionweb.com

“While the hype surrounding Web services may soon reach proportions comparable to the bygone portal era, many companies are betting that Web services will deliver.”
--Mark W. Vigoroso, E-Commerce Times, Dec. 2002

“We are very pleased with the progress of Amazon Web Services since it launched just ten months ago ... We continue to actively apply this innovative technology to further our mission of helping our customers find, discover and buy - anywhere on the Web.”
--Jason Kilar, Amazon.com Vice President of Worldwide Software Applications (The Amazon Web Services Software Development Kit 3.0 is part of the retailer's associates program, launched in July 2002. The retailer claims to have 25,000 developers in the program; see Amazon.com/webservices)

“At last fall's Gartner Symposium, just before an icebreaker session on Web services, I asked several attendees--presumably C-level technology executives--if they could give me a definition of Web services. Their answers fell into one of three camps: Web hosting, Internet service provider, and application service provider. No one knew.”
--David Berlind, Feb, 2002

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