How do you define a Web service? If you ask five people to give you a definition, you'll probably get at least six answers. Is a Web service any application that can be accessed over the Web, or is it limited to applications that expose a programmatic interface? Is it the code that implements the service or the interface to the code? Do you have to use SOAP? What about XML-RPC? Or RosettaNet? Or FIXML? Or some other XML protocol? And do you have to use XML? Does SWIFT qualify as a Web service?

The hype surrounding Web services mounts with every day. Dynamic composition of applications. Obsolescence of traditional applications. The claims escalate as technologists work mightily to craft compelling visions of disruptive technologies.

The hype around Web services has been deafening. Equally, there have been plenty of critics awaiting Web services' march behind other over-hyped technologies into the graveyard of 'The Next Big Thing That Wasn't.' However, when you look at the number of enterprises that have rolled out successful Web services projects to solve real business problems in a relatively short period of time, it is increasingly hard to sound Web services' death knell.

Since the king discovered that the coffers were bare, or at least shrinking, in 2001, IT spending for big ticket items has been in lockdown mode, while all the king's men work to put everything bought in '99 and 2000 together.

The emergence of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is an exciting development, providing a springboard for the advancement of flexible, dynamic distributed computing solutions. For those not familiar with SOAs, you can think of them as loosely coupled pieces of applications that are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a network.

Over the past year or so Web services has developed into the latest and greatest development craze. The Web services concept provides a strong impetus for current development of both of the major competing enterprise platforms - Microsoft's .NET and Sun Microsystem's J2EE. In the Java world the Web services initiative is one of the main focus points for ongoing J2EE 1.4 development.

Over the past couple of years, an idea has emerged (some might argue it's an old idea) that software will be transformed into being used as services, rather than as monolithic applications tied to a specific machine or platform. Rather than install software onto computers every time we need some functionality, an end user or corporation can reuse other application assets over the network. The idea expands into the notion of just-in-time delivery of applications.

One of the greatest challenges faced by Web services developers is the fact that the term 'Web services' isn't well understood outside the developer community. We've all experienced requests from product managers, customers, or salespeople who had no idea that connecting two disparate systems takes more than a few lines of code. The situation will only get worse with the increased complexity of business-process, transaction, and workflow management.

WSJ's Industry Editor, Norbert Mikula, recently spoke with Dave Deutschman, chief technology officer of Quintessent Communications, headquartered in Seattle, WA., about their entry into the Web services market.

IBM and Microsoft recently launched another Web services-related effort - the Web Services Interoperability Organization , or WS-I for short. Its charter is to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. I, for one, view interoperability as absolutely critical to the success of Web services technology. I don't think I'm alone in the view, since more than 60 companies joined the consortium within the first week. Obviously the formation of this group is a 'good thing.'

Have you played with SOAP yet? If so, which SOAP implementations have you used so far? Even though SOAP is on its way to becoming a standard, one thing you'll notice is that every SOAP implementation has a different programming interface. SOAP only defines the format of the messages that are sent across the wire. It doesn't define the way that a Java application interacts with SOAP.

Security concerns, especially since the events of last Fall, are at the center of many industry discussions. Ever-increasing reports of hacker activities and security holes in well-known software products further fuel the debate, and rightfully so. Web services is a great new technology that will form the underpinning for electronic business of the future. So making Web services secure should be, and is, one of the activities our industry needs to focus on most. Beyond the very basic aspects of security, reliability, authentication and nonrepudiation issues, however, another related issue also deserves to be looked at: trust.

I was quite amused by a series of articles talking about the battle between Java and .NET that appeared in mid-January. One article said that Java has a two-to-one lead over .NET based on an informal online poll. Meanwhile, in an article entitled 'Outlook: Java tech trends through 2004,' Mark Driver at Gartner claimed, 'Microsoft's emerging NET platform will continue to garner most of the vision and mind share for Web-services-based development efforts.' And in an article entitled, 'Enterprise Java Bulks Up,' Thomas Murphy of META Group said, 'The lack of standards support will not enable Java to compete as effectively with the challenge raised by Microsoft .Net.' With such drastically differing opinions out there, I thought it would be entertaining to conduct my own investigation. Since I don't have the resources to conduct a statistically significant survey, I decided to base my research on newsgroup and discussion list traffic. The way I figure it, traffic on these forums should be a good indication of the actual use of the technology

There are plenty of jokes regarding the world of standards development, from 'Standards are like sausages - you're better off not knowing how they were created' to the old-time paradox: 'The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.'

Do you have a .NET Passport identity? You may not realize it, but chances are reasonably high that you do. If you have a HotMail or MSN account, Microsoft assigned a Passport identity to you automatically. Microsoft claims to have more than 160 million users registered in the Passport identity service.

Hype is a very useful marketing tool. You come up with a new idea, something with real potential. You go out and raise awareness, you evangelize about how this new technology will revolutionize business. If you market it well, you create a buzz. The next thing you know, you've got lots of people talking about it. New businesses start popping up. Money starts to flow. Suddenly you're on your way to endless riches...at least for a little while.

Most of the major providers of development platforms have already started shipping development tools for Web services. It seems inevitable that everyone will jump on the Web services bandwagon in the not-so-distant future. However, in the minds of many there are still lingering questions: Why bother? What can I do with Web services that I couldn't do before? And maybe even more relevant: How can I do it better? This month we'll examine how Web services can help companies cut costs, create new revenue sources, and ultimately improve their bottom lines. As part of this discussion, we'll reintroduce a term that's once again in the hearts and minds of all IT executives: ROI - Return on Investment. We'll look at both sides of the equation, 'return' as well as 'investment.'

The fundamental notions behind Web service implementations are not new. In fact, many people would argue that their existing Internet RPC systems are Web services. What is different is the use of XML, and XML messaging structures based on SOAP, to control and support these services. This provides a consistent, open means of interaction that is easy to understand and assimilate; and this is what drove the original HTML content revolution and the birth of the Web itself.

To understand what all the fuss about Web services is, it's useful to start with a little history. As Forrest Gump's mother said, 'You can't look forward without putting the past behind you.' So what have we all been doing this past decade? First, we've made massive investments in systems that automate our company business processes. Sometimes we have connected them internally and sometimes we've connected them externally to our trading partners; usually we haven't done much of either.

Web services are a great vision to talk about. as evidenced by the increasing number of companies declaring themselves the leader in the Web services market. Hype aside, just as with XML, sooner or later we'll all realize there's no Web services market per se but only ways to apply Web services as part of B2B machine-to-machine integration, enterprise portals, knowledge management, marketplaces, self-service forms, and so on. In other words, what we need to focus on is how to use Web services to solve specific technical problems rather than getting excited about new and more dynamic 'plumbing.'

The Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) is a new Java application programming interface (API) that provides a standard way for Java applications to send and receive Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages. The basic idea is to allow developers to spend more time building, sending, receiving, and deconstructing messages for their applications and less time programming low-level XML communications routines. Developed through the Java Community Process, JAXM provides a simple yet flexible standard API for developing and deploying SOAP-based applications that can be truly interoperable with applications developed on other platforms.

Last month, in Part 1 of this article, I cautioned about the potential invasiveness of Web services. It's a scary thought that companies could have that much personal information about their customers, but I added then that there are some advantages to Web services, especially in the area of business-to-business. This month I focus on these advantages.

So, what is going on in the world of Web services? I'm looking at a ton of analyst reports saying Web services won't be mainstream for another two or three years. One firm says that only 16% of companies will use Web services this year. I suppose it comes down to your definition of Web services. Which is another question I get a lot-what is a Web service? Some people have a very broad definition and include Web sites that execute functionality.

So here we are, more than four years since XML (eXtensible Markup Language) first saw the light of the public day. We have come a long way since the early days. The XML hype started with a small group of experts who argued that SGML wasn't suitable for Web-based publishing and that HTML is pure evil anyway. Today, top-level executives of larger and smaller companies around the world announce that XML will solve all the problems of the world, including, but not limited to, the common cold.

I've been at this game for a while, a fact that has been hammered into my awareness with distressing frequency of late. I worked with Hollerith cards in college, running my programs through a machine with a distressing tendency to shred my carefully typed code into so much confetti if the deck was not perfectly aligned in the bin. I can remember a time when mentioning the object-oriented programming paradigm was a sure invitation to fisticuffs between its adherents and the old guard. In fact, SQL hadn't even been conceived when I went through college.

Web Services is a term that is being used to define a set of technologies that exposes business functionality over the Web as a set of automated interfaces. These automated interfaces allow businesses to discover and bind to interfaces at run-time, supposedly minimizing the amount of static preparation that is needed by other integration technologies. The question is, 'Do Web Services solve the business problem they propose to solve?'

So, people keep asking me, 'Steve, how come you are such a wild and crazy guy?' OK, sorry, a late 70s flashback there.

Web Services Edge 2001 West Keynote Panel - Full Transcript Sean Rhody: I would like to introduce from my right first, Barry Morris of IONA. Dirk Slama of Shinka, Greg O'Connor from Sonic, Eileen Richardson from Infravio, Ali Kutay from AltoWeb and Annrai O'Toole from Cape Clear. I ask you all to welcome our speakers. (Applause). Probably the question that is on almost everybody's mind is, what are Web services? I know I have a whole magazine devoted to answering that question, but I think one of the most interesting parts of the magazine is that the answers are different for different people and from different people. So to start things off I'll go down and ask each of the panelists that question. In your mind, Barry, what are Web services?

Long touted as a revolutionary technology, Web services promise to make IT infrastructures obsolete. They enable the free flow of information across systems, lowering the cost and complexity of integration across entire enterprises.