Embracing Web Services

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Embracing Web Services

• A Necessary Step for a More Effective and
  Responsive IT Infrastructure?
• Bruce Jolliffe and Richard Spencer

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Agenda

• Why invest in web services?
• What are web services?
• How should UBC respond to web services?
• Discussion

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Why invest in web services?

• IT strives to deploy systems meeting the
  Universitys needs in a cost effective, timely,
  seamless manner
• Systems need to be malleable to meet the ever
  changing needs of the University
• Solutions involve a combination of new systems,
  reusing existing systems, and reworking how the
  systems interact and integrate

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Why invest in web services?

• Systems provide ever growing functionality but
  that function is not easily integrated into
  larger processes
• what integration we do have tends to be
  piecemeal, proprietary, and not very seamless
• Web services a set of widely supported emerging
  standards that promise to provide the glue to
  integrate programmatically disparate IT systems
• just as the TCP/IP standard did for networking
• just as the W3C HTTP/HTML standards did for the
  information retrieval infrastructure

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Why invest in web services?

• UBC needs to begin building skills, acquiring
  knowledge, and gaining practical development and
  operational experience in the web services arena
• take advantage of the web services potential
• gradually reshape its systems in the web services
  mould so that they become more effective and
  timelymeeting UBCs mission

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What Web Services Context

• Web services fits into a larger context
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• principles
• Web Services Framework (WSF)
• standards and interoperability profiles
• Network Application Platform (NAP)
• implementation

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What Web Services Context

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Overarching design principles
• loose coupling
• metadata describing interfaces
• Interfaces expose services of accompanying
  component or system
• Total solution built by orchestrating a
  composition of components

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What Web Services Context

• Web Services Framework (WSF)
• emerging standards used to implement a SOA
• core standards for
• syntax, service description, discovery, message
  exchange
• enterprise standards
• reliability, transactions, security, management,
  service orchestration
• interoperability profiles

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What Web Services Context

• Network Access Platform (NAP)
• combination of hardware and software used to
  implement solutions
• Built on previous distributed computing
  interoperability experiences and goes beyond
• CORBA, DCOM, etc.

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What Risks

• Web Services is a work in progress
• some mature core protocols
• syntax, description, message exchange, and
  discovery
• many emerging protocols that address
• reliability, transactions, security, management,
  and service orchestration
• Vendors reluctantly realize a common standard
  could benefit them
• Camps
• Microsoft, IBM, BEA,
• Sun, Oracle,

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What Risks

• Standards
• OASIS
• W3C
• WS-I (Web Services Interoperability)profiles

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What Web Services Definition (W3C)

• A Web service is a software system designed to
  support interoperable machine-to-machine
  interaction over a network. It has an interface
  described in a machine-processable format
  (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with
  the Web service in a manner prescribed by its
  description using SOAP messages, typically
  conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in
  conjunction with other Web-related standards.

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What Web Services Stack
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What Core Web Services Standards

• XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, XLST 1.0, XPath 1.0
• SOAP 1.1 messaging
• WSDL 1.1 interface metadata
• UDDI 2.0 discovery
• Strong support across Java, .NET, and LAMP
  (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) frameworks
• UBC has some experience using XML to describe
  payloads exchanged between applications

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How UBC and Web Services

• How should UBC approach web services?
• development
• operations
• ongoing learning process
• Start with synchronous (RPC style) exchanges
  using XML, WSDL, and SOAP
• Later begin work with asynchronous document
  oriented exchanges
• workflow

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How UBC and Web Services

• Overall goal of first steps
• gain experience
• begin to understand what it means to move to a
  set of composable high level components
• composed components in turn will lead to improved
  service delivery and a more effective and
  competitive university
• Whether we build or buy customization will
  eventually revolve around a SOA web services
  infrastructure

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How Where is UBC Now?

• Dabbled in XML RPC style exchanges over HTTP
• not built on the description efficiencies (WSDL)
• Candidates
• CWL, SIS, credit card payment, directory (once
  unified)

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How Pragmatics

• There are a growing number of tools
• AXIS (Apache foundation)
• MS .NET
• Various JAX-RPC toolkits (Web Services Developer
  Pack)
• jUDDI (open source UDDI)

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Discussion