(November 18, 2002) - (Last week, WSJ-IN asked industry experts, all intimately familiar with Web Services in all their flavors, colors, and spins, to answer the question: 'What is Web Services?" Following, the most recent response to that question, from a representative of Sun Microsystems.)

Web services are software components that respond to service requests using a set of open standards. Sun prefers a simple definition of Web services for two reasons: First of all, simplicity is a base characteristic of the fuel necessary to propel Web services into mass adoption - simple verbs connecting virtually infinite nouns. Secondly, the more definitions we tack on to Web services the more we risk limiting their application; Web services is software delivery concept that, in the end, is much bigger and revolutionary than the technical constructs on which current efforts depend.

Web services emerged as a confluence of ideas that emanate from three distinct areas: the Web, XML-based enterprise application integration, and interface-based distributed computing models. Most initial efforts in Web services have involved building standards-based interfaces between internal systems as an alternative to proprietary or "custom-code" integration solutions. This path represents the usage of Web services in a way that is "minimally invasive" in terms of changing the way IT organizations design and build software. As Web services usage expands and matures, the organizations that want to leverage the promises of a services-oriented architecture will need to adopt new approaches, new tools and new development patterns. Here are just a few of the implications that need to be addressed:

1.   Security, management and transactional integrity will need to move from the center of the network out to the edge of the network where most transactions will occur.

2.   Application development will start with process flow definition and interface generation - and code writers will work only where necessary between the connection points.

3.   Current development tools and systems management approaches will need to be fundamentally reengineered to support new realities.