Enterprise services: examining the emerging field of web services and how its integrated into existing enterprise infrastructure

This article examines the emerging field of web services and how it is integrated into existing enterprise infrastructures. The article describes an architecture that builds upon web services proposals in a standard and extensible way. Some of the attributes of web Services discussed include protocols, interoperability, modularity and availability. The article is aimed at offering benefits to enterprises by providing a services-oriented vision. The creation of a class of enterprise services allows one to create services that are modular, accessible, well described, implementation-independent and interoperable,yet still efficient, manageable and that work with existing infrastructures. Using this infrastructure, process managers can allow business processes to be composed and choreographed based on exposed enterprise and web services. One other powerful aspect of the web services vision is that it unifies two styles of integration request-response and messaging. Typically, many integration approaches have selected either tightly coupled request-response approach, or the loosely coupled one-way messaging. (AN: 12513642)