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old object models to new object models....

I've spent the last couple of days researching the hot trend in software service enablement that is made possible by the idea of web services. I remember back in 2000, when I was still working as a network and pc support technician reading a book on the emerging tool of xml. At this time, the growing needs of web sites to store and provide content thanks to the exploding number of individuals coming online to buy, trade and interact necessitated a way to stream line content creation, transformation and delivery to different locations in different formats. Xml was the magic bullet that was able to provide all these things when used cleverly. I soon found myself during my free time at work, reading the chapters on how xml worked and how to perform xsl transformations. I became convinced that xml related technologies were the future and with that conviction in mind began a secret hunt for a job while I was still working at the bank. I was able to get a job with TheStreet.com in a matter of weeks and was sufficiently enthusiastic and competent to get the job. While at TheStreet.com I got to experience first hand the revolution of xml and the power of it as weilded over the problem of controlling web content. In the system I worked on, nostalgically called "rosebud" by the designers, xml were the rails upon which the content of the site rolled. Several simple relationships between xml content blocks and pages to be rendered in the StoryServer development environment, alone with a distribution method to multiple outbound locations, file or ftp allowed the site to publish content in house and then distribute it in various forms to outside partners (for a fee) as well as to the main web sites of the company. The experience of building many of the xml feeds that brought revenue to the company convinced me further that xml was the future. I imagined a system that could be used as an xml nexus, taking in content in the form of xml , transforming it for the needs of the system and then transforming it again to desired output formats for delivery to external partners. Though we did do this to an extent at TheStreet.com it was not the jist of the companies business, which was to provide financial news and commentary, the content distribution was only a side effect of the businesses goals. I saw xml as more than just something useful for financial news content management, I saw it as something that could potentially manage any outbound or inbound data interaction between disparate systems. As I continued to work at TSC, the proposals to use xml as a lingua franca of data transmission between different platforms was born. Wrapped into the moniker of "web services", these xml grammars would allow systems to speak a common language that could be used by remote systems to authenticate, request method or object acces to various entities on remote systems and recieve the requested data in synchronous or asynchronous fashion. Since then web services as flowered with various protocols for ensuring certain tasks are performed in efficient and safe ways for their use in the enterprise. Security being chief among them as covered by the ws-security protocol.

Today, web services form the backbone of another raging buzz word in Information technology in the last few years, SOA. Web services are what make SOA's possible by providing the underlying fluid interface for mediating data and object requests between applications internally and between enterprises externally. Unfortunately, with all this new use of xml to do things that it was not originally designed to do comes one major issue, complexity. The web services protocols are not very intuitive but once it is realized that all they do is allow remote applications to talk to one another, then old dinosaurs who are familiar with older acronyms like CORBA, DCOM or COM will know just now to deal with the new parts once they are mapped to their object model equivalents. The key difference between web services and the previous object models however is how agnostic they are of the platforms that they run on. The industry has actually succeeded in providing a deep level of platform neutrality that has enabled enterprises to enable a new level of efficiency as far as remote data mediation is concerned. There are still many issues to work out in the areas of security, and still many things that are done inefficiently by the inherent nature of the use of an xml grammar to do them (like sending files) but these are finding solutions. The complexity of these new solutions must be absorbed and abstracted just as was done for the old component object models, through late nights and lots of coffee but the promise of infinitely interoperable systems free from lockin is actually palpable. Is this current round of an object model technology going to be the last one? Or in a few years, will web services be deemed old news and replaced by another new fangled technology that does the same old job in a new way? Only time will tell...

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