eGov News

The latest news from FCW, GCN, KableNet, GovTech, and more ...

Web Services

Clouds and grids - evolution or revolution?
This report compares grid and cloud computing services, taking a practical look at implementations of both: namely the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project for grid and the Amazon Web Service (AWS) for cloud. Taking performance, scale, ease of use, costs, functionality and other aspects into consideration, the report looks at the overall opportunity that converging cloud and grid services can bring to users.

Sun technologist: SOAP stack a 'failure'
InfoWorld, Paul Krill, July 24, 2008: The SOAP stack for Web services was branded a failure this week by Tim Bray, a Sun Microsystems technologist and co-inventor of XML, who hailed the REST (Representational State Transfer) mechanism as a SOAP alternative. "The SOAP stack is generally regarded as an embarrassing failure these days," said Bray, who is Sun director of Web technologies, in an interview Wednesday afternoon at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. "REST does what [the SOAP stack] was trying to do in a much more viable, elegant, cheap, affordable way except that we've got no tooling around it yet."

Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services, Part 1: Introduction and overview
This series introduces you to cloud computing using Amazon Web Services and details the compelling alternative it provides for architecting and building scalable and reliable applications. In this first article, explore the features of this virtual infrastructure and the services that you can use to build today’s Web-scale systems.

Demystifying the Cloud
Web-based software, storage, and other services are enticing alternatives to do-it-yourself IT. But different cloud vendors have different strengths. When people talk about "plugging into the IT cloud," they generally have something very simple in mind-browser access to an application hosted on the Web. Cloud computing is certainly that, but it's also much more. What follows is the longer, more detailed explanation.

Members Approve Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0 as OASIS Standard
30 May 2008. IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, Vignette and Others Collaborate on Open Standard for Integrating Web Services into Portals. OASIS, the international open standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) version 2.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee, the new standard simplifies the effort required for aggregating applications, such as portals, to quickly integrate remote content and applications.

BPEL XML.org
This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the WS-BPEL OASIS Standard and related specifications. BPEL uses Web services standards to describe business process activities as Web services, defining how they can be composed to accomplish specific tasks. This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content.

BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask to OASIS
The BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specs are headed to OASIS, resulting in a new BPEL4People Technical Committee (TC) - expect to see an announcement and call for participation soon. The TC will focus on defining human interactions (human tasks) as part of a WS-BPEL process, enabling these definitions to be exposed as web services.

SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
This book demonstrates service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a concrete discipline rather than a hopeful collection of cloud charts. Built upon the author's firsthand experience rolling out a SOA at a major corporation, SOA in Practice explains how SOA can simplify the creation and maintenance of large-scale applications. Whether your project involves a large set of Web Services-based components, or connects legacy applications to modern business processes, this book clarifies how -- and whether -- SOA fits your needs.

Enterprise SOA
Information Technology professionals can use this book to move beyond the excitement of web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) and begin the process of finding actionable ideas to innovate and create business value. In Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation, SAP's blueprint for putting SOA to work is analyzed from top to bottom. In addition to design, development, and architecture, vital contextual issues such as governance, security, change management, and culture are also explored. This comprehensive perspective reduces risk as IT departments implement ESA, a sound, flexible architecture for adapting business processes in response to changing market conditions. Based on extensive research with experts from the German software company SAP, this definitive book is ideal for architects, developers, and other IT professionals who want to understand the technology and business relevance of ESA in a detailed way - especially those who want to move on the technology now, rather than in the next year or two.

The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0
In The New Language of Business, senior IBM executive Sandy Carter demonstrates how to leverage SOA, Web 2.0, and related technologies to drive new levels of operational excellence and business innovation. Writing for executives and business leaders inside and outside IT, Carter explains why flexibility and responsiveness are now even more crucial to success–and why services-based strategies offer the greatest promise for achieving them. You’ll learn how to organize your business into reusable process components–and support them with cost-effective IT services that adapt quickly and easily to change. Then, using extensive examples - including a detailed case study describing IBM’s own experience - Carter identifies best practices, pitfalls, and practical starting points for success.

Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices
Companies face major challenges as they seek to flourish in competitive global markets, fuelled by developments in technology, from the Internet to grid computing and Web services. In this environment, service orientation - aligning business processes to the changing demands of customers - is emerging as a highly effective approach to increasing efficiency. In this book, Paul Allen provides an accessible guide to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. The book provides an integrated approach: after covering the basics of service orientation, he discusses key issues such as business agility, designing quality-of-service infrastructure, implementing service-level agreements, and cultural factors. He provides roadmaps, definitions, templates, techniques, process patterns and checklists to help you realize service orientation. These resources are reinforced with detailed case studies, from the transport and banking sectors. Packed with valuable insights, the book will be essential reading for CIOs, IT architects and senior developers. IT facing business executives will also benefit from understanding how software services can enable their business strategies. Paul Allen is a principal business-IT strategist at CA and is widely recognized for his innovative work in component-based development (CBD), business-IT alignment and service-oriented architecture. With over thirty years experience of large-scale business systems, he is an established author whose previous book was the critically acclaimed 'Realizing e-Business with Components'. Sam Higgins is now with Forrester Research Inc.; formerly he managed the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Paul McRae is the application architect in the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Hermann Schlamann is a senior architect in the architecture group of Credit Suisse.

Putting a Face on Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture
SAP Info, 8 August 2007. To drive the use of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP combines groups of enterprise services and documentation related by business context in enterprise service bundles. The bundles help you design service-based processes like invoice creation. SAP is making it easier to combine technology and business functionality with enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Enterprise SOA is a business-driven software architecture that supports business requirements through enterprise services. The SAP NetWeaver platform is the technical foundation of enterprise SOA, and its tools are used to create the enterprise services that support new business processes. Like Web services, enterprise services are software modules that are based on open standards like WSDL, XML, and SOAP. But enterprise services go beyond Web services; enterprise services contain semantics that have been harmonized for business and clearly map structured business functionality. If enterprise services are combined in a specific sequence, you can define process steps and set up service-oriented business scenarios.

Where's XML Going?
Kurt Cagle, O'Reilly XML Blog 19 July 2007. As I was thinking about things to write for this particular column, this realization about age began to sink in about the standard that I've spent the last decade writing about. A decade is a long time in computer circles, especially when you figure that there's only been five or six of them in the whole history of computing. XML has gone from being a 'standard' that perhaps a couple dozen people worldwide knew about to a pervasive technology that is so well entrenched that many people don't really even think much about it any more. We argue about the XMLification of word processing and spreadsheet programs, we debate whether Atom or RSS 2.0 will predominate, we shake our heads at the whole notion of web services and how the dominant web services protocol was designed largely by bloggers to let people know about their websites.

OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web
Andy Powell and David Recordon, Ariadne Issue 51: OpenID is a single sign-on system for the Internet which puts people in charge. OpenID is a user-centric technology which allows a person to have control over how their Identity is both managed and used online. By being decentralised there is no single server with which every OpenID-enabled service and every user must register. Rather, people make their own choice of OpenID Provider, the service that manages their OpenID. One key function which OpenID supports is the ability for a person to have 'single sign-on' across multiple OpenID-enabled services. Having provided their OpenID to the Relying Party they want to access, users are then redirected to their OpenID Provider in order to check their credentials. This means that sites which implement OpenID do not ever know the user's actual password (or other credentials). The benefit to users is increased security, particularly by employing a strong approach such as a one-time-password to login to their Provider, and a much simpler login experience on the Web. Note that although true single sign-on is achievable using OpenID it is not a requirement and there may be reasons why an individual will want to retain multiple online identities (i.e. multiple OpenIDs) for their different online activities.

Zotero - The Next-Generation Research Tool
Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).