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In February 2005, Explorer's Component-Based Software Engineering technology area was replaced with a new area: Web Services. Viewpoints About This Technology (January 2003) In the past two decades, software has enabled businesses to automate and streamline external and internal processes, achieving huge cost savings and finding new business opportunities. Although the hype and excitement about e-business and e-commerce have disappeared, software, particularly Internet- and intranet-based software, will continue to have a profound impact on business in the decade ahead. But for companies to realize the potential of software, they need technologies that cope with, and take advantage of, the distributed and varying resources on networks. Companies also need software methodologies that can drive down the high cost of software development and systems integration. Components are reusable pieces of software code that serve as building blocks within an application framework. Although these components owe much to the field of object-oriented technology, they are often larger and more abstract than pure software objects are, containing whole or part applications rather than application-specific source-code instructions. With a coherent and enterprisewide architecture model, components can drastically reduce the complexity of a company’s information system. Beyond components are Web services—an emerging generation of Web-based software components that use XML and HTTP. Web services promise to take component-based software engineering forward and to improve software systems’ suitability for the dynamic nature of modern networks in which resources appear and disappear. Because Web services use standard Internet technologies, they are relatively easy for developers to understand, reducing development time and therefore cost. Web services move systems away from the layered architectures that began in the days of client/server computing and continued with component-based software. Web services will see far more decentralized applications and face new security and systems-management challenges. The long-term vision of many proponents of Web services is global interoperability, in which all Web services can communicate with one another in a single global network. Such a vision has profound implications. For example, the electronic boundaries of companies would become far more fluid than they are today, and corporate IT systems would operate more as business organisms than as components within the regimented IT structures that most companies operate in today. With many major vendors backing Web services, progress toward some version of the goal seems nearly certain. Less certain is whether Web services will, as IBM put it, “have a more profound effect on business over the next five years than the Internet in the last five” or whether Web services will simply allow companies to create Web-based applications more efficiently. |
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