Saturday, March 10, 2007

Web Services are NOT for Web

Yes this is right Web Services are NOT at all for Web. Last few days/weeks I spent reading through different journals, conference papers and articles to understand what Web Services are all about. At the end when I was writing down my concluding notes on what I read and what I understood. I came up with the conclusion that Web Services miss the Web part and are better of called as Internet Services.

Internet and Web
The first question that comes to anybody's mind is that are they two different thing? I mean Web and Internet aren't they same thing? To a novice reader there is no difference between Web and Internet. Web today is the major means of publishing and accessing information. Starting as a closed network to exchange emails and share files for scientific reasons, today it has become a global media used for information dissemination and information access within little over a decade.

Internet is the infrastructure and the TCP/IP stack we are talking here. It is the backbone of the World-Wide-Web. It handles all the communication and the data transfer. Web is just an application of the Internet. There are other applications like File Transfer, Voice and Data transfer etc. All of them use the infrastructure provided by Internet.

Where is the missing?
Web Services technologies today are far from being in a state where the automated and seamless integration is possibility. There are known problems in the Web Services arena and researchers around the world are working on to overcome those problems.

Web services are mainly based on transient message exchange and not on persistent publication of data. As a matter of fact, Web services are far from using the Web as means for information publication and access. Instead of following the ’persistently publish and read’ paradigm of the Web, traditional Web services using WSDL and SOAP establish a tightly coupled communication cycle, most frequently using a synchronous HTTP transaction to transmit data. URIs, which are meant as unique and persistent identifiers for resources are used only for the identification of the participant, whereas the information exchanged is hidden in the SOAP message.

In next posting I will discuss how the Web Services as a Technology do not fit the specifications of the web. There will also mention why apart from name Web is not there in Web Services at all.

Until Next Time ...:)

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