Here we go again. The latest notion to take the information system development world by storm is that of Web services. Major vendors (including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems) are outlining their Web services strategies, and the press is promoting the concept as the biggest paradigm shift since the Web itself. At the same time, rank-and-file IT professionals are trying to understand what Web services are, and their value within the enterprise. The promise of Web services is exciting: the ability to create new applications by aggregating the services of many other applications that exist locally or remotely on the Internet.

Before organizations jump on the bandwagon, though, they should consider several issues:

• First, the concept of Web services is still mostly "marketecture." There are no large implementations of Web services-based applications, albeit new-generation applications are emerging. So the advantages and limitations of this technology are not yet fully understood.

• Second, this is an old idea with new wrapping. The concept is similar to the decades-old promise of distributed objects: provide the infrastructure for applications to exchange information, as well as leverage methods encapsulated within those applications. Web services simply put a newer, sexier architecture and enabling technology into the mix, most importantly adding the word "Web."

• Finally, standards overload prevails. As in the days of distributed objects, vendors see a hot space emerging and are staking their Web services claims, publishing proprietary standards that they call "open." The inevitable shakeout will only delay the acceptance of Web services.

Despite the usual drawbacks of emerging technology, Web services--at least the notion of Web services--is an interesting technology for the world of inter- and intracompany application integration. Web services hold the promise of moving beyond the simple exchange of information--the dominating mechanism for application integration today--to the concept of accessing application services that are encapsulated within old and new applications. This means organizations not only can move information from application to application, but they also can create composite applications, leveraging any number of back-end application services found in any number of applications, local or remote.

Key to this concept is figuring out how Web services fit into the existing application integration technology and approaches. For example, when is the use of Web services appropriate, and how is cost-effectiveness determined? Keep in mind that implementing Web services is bound to be an invasive process and thus more expensive than enabling systems for simple information exchange.

Evolving Approaches

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