Silos of information are out. Integrated applications are in. So how do you start? Let’s take a look at integration technology called Web Services, and the issues that you’ll need to think about when integrating applications using this technology.
Web Services have been prominently talked about as the technology that allows an easier integration of applications – that works across platforms and implementation similarities. So you can integrate a Java application with a .NET application in a fairly transparent manner.
Optimize Magazine recently published an article that examines “What’s Next for Web Services?” – and in a nutshell, says the following:
- The need for flexibility is driving the interest --- yep.
- Speed to deployment and reusability of services is nice too --- yep.
- People are actually thinking about interoperability – how to actually have applications talk to one another – let’s call it the “Anti-Silo” Movement. – very refreshing.
- There’s more interest in software architects and to designing a model-driven systems architecture that can bring different applications together in a thoughtful way – knowing that a system is always evolving –- don’t get lost in analysis paralysis – think “iterate”.
- Pay attention to performance.
- Pay attention to redundancy and uptime – absolutely! A must-have for the view of reliability in the eyes of the users.
- Pay attention to your user interface and the user experience, as you bring all this functionality together – the ongoing issue that is also ever-evolving.
- Always think about having your systems be browser-based – absolutely… with the occasional need for hand-held support as well.
In my experience, exposing web services and writing web service clients to backend systems for point-to-point integration and customization is a very straight forward process – but it takes thought and communication to ensure that the methods exposed are understood.
The security issues are fairly straight forward to address, and having systems communicate across the Internet is not all that painful when you think about performance up front.
A recent blog post at ZDNet takes a broad look at Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), which is what encompasses Web Services, and the common issues found with web services implementations. Check out “Politics, business, technology — in THAT order”.
In my view – any dialog with a vendor when evaluating software applications needs to look at the availability of a web services-based interface for integration. Any vendor that doesn’t have this capability, should have a commitment to offering it as an option. If they don’t, even if you like the functionality, maybe you’d be better served over the long haul to move on to a vendor who is interested in integrated applications that allow you to provide what you need to your end users.
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