Web Services at COMDEX 2002	SIGPC Vol. 7, No. 2 Jan. 23, 2003

by Shihong Huang

Web services have been a hot topic for the past few years. Their promise of seamless access to applications over the Internet is very attractive. However, the difficult economic climate for information technology companies has caused the focus of Web services to shift. Previously, it was a topic for geeks, with discussions full of acronyms like SOAP and WSDL. Now, Web services have become a topic for business, with discussions using more common acronyms like EAI and ROI. This shift was strikingly apparent at COMDEX 2002.

What are Web Services?

There are many articles, journals, and Web sites that promote the use of Web services in almost all possible situations. The result is that there is so much hype surrounding Web services that it is quite difficult to distinguish marketing claims from technical innovation and business reality. This is not helped by the fact that there are probably as many definitions of Web services as there are companies building them.

On November 14, 2002, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published three important documents related to Web services: Web Services Architecture, Web Services Glossary, and Web Services Architecture Requirements. At its core, the W3C’s definition captures the shared essence of what a Web service is: network-accessible interfaces to application functionality.

The full definition of Web services from W3C is as follows:

A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.

No matter which definition is used, the Web services core is composed of four underlying technologies: connection (XML), communication (SOAP), description (WSDL), and discovery (UDDI). This is illustrated in Table 1. The table is taken from “Adoption Challenges in Migrating to Web Services” by Tilley et al, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Web Site Evolution (WSE 2002: October 2, 2002; Montréal, Canada), pp. 21-29. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 2002.

Table 1: Web Service Protocol Stack
(Adapted from Web Services Essentials by E. Cerami, O’Reilly & Associates, 2002)

File, Print...Kinko’s

At COMDEX 2002, Microsoft seemed to be the only major company that was emphasizing Web services. However, they were doing it in a very application-oriented manner; their focus was definitely not on the .NET technologies, but on .NET value-add. This is quite different from many of the other trade shows in 2001 and 2002, and represents a gradual maturation of the field.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates delivered his annual keynote address at MGM Grand Garden Arena. He highlighted several technologies in the “digital decade”, including the new Tablet PC, SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology), and Web Services. Microsoft’s Web services application are built around ASP.NET, which is included in Microsoft .NET Framework. Visual Studio.NET is a development tool designed to create ASP.NET Web application. Since .NET is a long-term and potentially high-risk strategy for the company, Web services (which can be viewed as a subset of .NET) are extremely important to Microsoft.

As an example of Web services use, during his keynote, Mr. Gates demonstrated a new piece of functionality that is added to Word. Microsoft and Kinko’s jointly developed this application, which basically extends the File/Print command with a new File/Print to Kinko’s option. This lets the user send a file to be printed directly on one of Kinko’s printers, anywhere that Kinko’s are located. This new service is expected to release sometime in 2003.

From a user point of view, this seemingly simple new feature is a nice, logical addition to Word. From a developer point of view, there are a lot of Web services technologies that are needed to make this happen. This includes Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, the .NET Framework, .NET Alerts, and MapPoint.NET. It is hard to say how the ordinary users can benefit from the integration, but it certainly helps for big corporation’s printing jobs.

The faux demonstration of this new service at COMDEX 2002 was helped by the President and CEO of Kinko’s, Gary Kusin, who was wearing a standard Kinko’s employee apron to personally deliver the newly printed file sent from a Windows PC on the stage. It was a little too stiffly scripted, but the demo did illustrate the business use of Web services, albeit in a limited manner. Kinko’s customers can already use the Web to upload a file from their computer directly to a Kinko’s printer; this new service just integrates the equivalent functionality directly into Office products like Word and PowerPoint. In this sense, the promised “seamless integration” provided by Web services is a reality.

Whither Web Services?

There are of course several other major players in the Web services area. However, most of these companies chose not to participate in COMDEX (like IBM), or downplayed the novelty of Web services (like Sun). H-P had a large presence at COMDEX 2002, but they didn’t emphasize Web services very much (at least, not from what was visible to most show attendees).

It will be interesting to see what type of attention Web services receives in 2003. It is far from being a mature technology, but at least it has shown that it can add value to a business. The simple Microsoft/Kinko’s application is just a hint at what might be done.

Nevertheless, using Web services does come at a cost. There are major adoption issues related to learning new technology, deploying new server-side applications across the enterprise, and dealing with as-yet-unsolved issues of performance and security. Time will tell whether Web services wither away, or grow to become an essential part of modern pervasive computing.