23.11.06

Mashups make services flow

Ben Woodhead
NOVEMBER 21, 2006

GARTNER Research vice-president Nick Gall says terms and ideas such as mashups and wikis sound new-fangled, but the basic drivers of Web 2.0 have been around since the mid-1990s, and they are relevant to any organisation."There isn't much in the way of new technology here, it's just a deeper appreciation, a deeper understanding, of how web technologies can be put to new uses," Gall told last week's Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Sydney.

Gall describes Web 2.0 as the online equivalent of the open source movement and says its successes lie in the use of simple processes that can be read and reused by many organisations.

He points to major companies, including Amazon and Salesforce.com as businesses that have tapped into the movement to build web services that can be used by any organisation, from a micro-business to a major corporation.

"One thing we like to focus on is not just the coding standards and interface standards and so on, but some of the architectural principles underlying them -- the core web architectural principles that are really driving the way a lot of the Web 2.0 sites are structured," Gall says. "To give it a name, we call it web-oriented architecture.

"The basic idea here is that it's a form of service-oriented architecture that's more lightweight than a traditional enterprise SOA," he says.

One of the keys to making web services more accessible is using web addresses (URLs) and URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to identify data.

Many organisations have begun using standards such as XML, but so many are still relying on proprietary identifiers, which make it impossible to hook into their web services without first learning what the identifiers mean, Gall says.

"What makes something reusable is that it's generic."

Companies are also using too many verbs to define actions, such "get customer", "get product", "create product" and "add line item", he says.

Instead, they should rely on the basic descriptors of "get", "update", "create", "add" and "delete" and let URLs and URIs embedded in the web service decide on the specific action.

Gall says Salesforce.com's AppExchange project is a shining example of how Web 2.0 principles could simplify the transmission of web services and make applications more interoperable. AppExchange hosts about 400 third-party applications that can be download and plugged into Saleforce.com's customer relationship management system.

"Salesforce.com only uses 17 verbs, 17 operations for every business activity on its site," Gall says. "Compare that with where you're going with your web service definitions.

"If they can do all of the business functionality that's available through third parties and through Salesforce with only 17 verbs, why do some of us have 170 verbs, or 200, or 400."

The Australian

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20777522%5E15302%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

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