It is a well-known fact that since the emergence of Internet, web and Ecommerce applications have become increasingly popular. With the growing demand of webbased applications, a number of issues have also increased proportionately regarding scalability, interoperability and application integration. “Web Services”, which is a new XML based framework introduced by W3C (World Wide Web consortium) has addressed several of these issues. Web Services defines a standard for achieving smooth communication among discrete application systems by using a framework based on the exchange of messages and documents in XML over standard internet protocols. Because Web Services comprises of other additional components (SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) apart from XML, it is widely used in large-scale enterprise applications and often its potential is overlooked in small business applications. Nevertheless, Web Services when employed in small-scale applications not only renders interoperability but also improves scalability to a great extent. For example, a simple interface of XML and SOAP that uses a minimal number of APIs in a web application could become a powerful feature to connect the application to other subsystems, saving on development cost, effort and time, compared to using complex middleware technologies such as CORBA or DCOM. Implementations using middleware technologies mostly require the use of request brokers, whereas in Web Services, the usage of service brokers is optional thereby eliminating the necessity to bind any remote interfaces. In addition, Web Services implementations are not vendor specific, hence there is no occurrence of vendor-imposed restrictions, whereas distributed system middleware technologies are vendor specific many a time. The only issue involved is which programming software to use for implementation and whether it would provide the maximum number of APIs to enable future upgrades. Also when there is bulk of data to be transmitted back and forth within the application, it is relatively easy and efficient to do so by using XML compared to using numerous request parameters or session attributes. Web Services can also be applied in combination with other Object Oriented frameworks such as MVC (Model View Controller), to bring out effective results in application performance.
In contrast to the above approach, if SOAP were not used, then a single Servlet would have to perform the entire process. Further if the system has to communicate with an external application system, several issues may arise on what middleware technology to use on the backend, which vendor to adopt, allocation of additional resources etc. This would not only complicate the development and maintenance activities but also result in poor scalability and reduced flexibility.
From the above discussion, it is evident that Web Services provides enormous flexibility in designing any web application. It also simplifies development, deployment and maintenance of the application. The architecture integrates well with most of the Object Oriented and Client-Server design patterns. Regardless of how small an application might be, Web Services can greatly empower the processing with interoperability, scalability and application integration.
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