Web Services Current Trends And Future Opportunities - Essay Example

Web Services - current trends and future opportunities Discuss the context of web services within the current status of the web. Compare this with the expectations placed on a fully semantic web. Also critically discuss those features of web services utilized in providing secure e- business solutions. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee---An English scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web expressed his vision of the semantic web as follows. I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize. - Tim Berners-Lee, 1999 We're well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), and mashups (APIs). Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we're starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360). Richard MacManus(2007) Web services extend the World Wide Web infrastructure to provide the means for software to connect to other software applications. Applications access Web services via ubiquitous Web protocols and data formats such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP, with no need to worry about how each Web service is implemented. Web services combine the best aspects of component-based development and the Web, and are a cornerstone of the Microsoft .NET programming model. MSDN Library(2008) Web Services in the business world, in the most simplistic fashion, provide a mechanism of communication between two remote systems, connected through the network of the Web Services. For example, in case of a merger or an acquisition, companies don't have to invest large sums of money developing software to bring the systems of the different companies together. By extending the business applications as Web Services, the information systems of different companies can be linked. These business systems then can be accessed by using simple SOAP messages over the normal HTTP Web protocol. For example, a manufacturing company requires some raw materials to be supplied whenever the material in stock reaches the threshold levels. These levels can be constantly monitored by the business system of a trusted supplier, and promptly replenished, without having to wait for a supervisor to notice it and generate a work order. Lakshmi Ananthamurthy(2004) The use of web applications from mobile devices is gaining popularity these days. Such as receiving personalized shopping offers as you walk through your local mall, or getting map directions while driving your car, or hooking up with your friends on a Friday night. Look for the big Internet companies like Yahoo and Google to become key mobile portals, alongside the operators. Web Services is the only remote invocation method for .Net compact Framework designed for mobile devices. Another concept is Attention Economy. That is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. The Attention Economy is about the consumer having choice - they get to choose where their attention is 'spent'. Another key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as the consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell. Web Services introduce a new vision of the web. Web today is both a platform and a database. Businesses are more likely to expose their information to the real world. With this emerges a new concept of the transformation of WebSites into web services. The transformation brings with it the issues of scalability and security. Richard MacManus (2007) As we approach 2009, the clear outlines of the new web are forming. This next generation of web is called Semantic Web or simply Web 3.0. The new web is moving beyond connecting pages to interconnecting data objects, concepts, and things. Ultimately Web 3.0 is really about creating technology that more accurately mirrors how we see and think about the world around us. Welcome to Web 3.0 (2008) Web 2.0 is about social networking and mass collaboration with the blurring of lines between content creator and user whereas Web 3.0 is based on "intelligent" web applications using, natural language processing, machine-based learning and reasoning and intelligent applications. The goal is to tailor online searching and requests specifically to users' preferences and needs. Although the intelligent web sounds similar to artificial intelligence, it's not quite the same. Web 3.0 is about openness. By "opening" application programming interfaces (APIs), protocols, data formats, open-source software platforms and open data, you open up possibilities for creating new tools. Although unlike openness can result in identity theft, Web 3.0 attempts to remedy this through open identity, openID, open reputation, and the ability for roaming portable identity and personal data. By opening up access to information, Web 3.0 applications can run on any device, computer, or mobile phone. Applications can be very fast and customizable. Unlike Web 2.0, where programs such as Facebook and MySpace exist in separate silos, Web 3.0 allows users to roam freely from database to database and program to program. Conceptually, Web 3.0 should be viewed as one large database. Dubbed "The Data Web", web 3.0 uses structured data records published to the Web in reusable and remote-queriable formats. XML technologies such as RDF Schema, OWL, SPARQL will make this possible by allowing information to be read across different programs across the web. Web 3.0 will use a three dimensional model and transform it into a series of 3D spaces. Services such as Second Life and the use of personalized avatars will be a common feature of the 3D web. Web 3.0 will extend beyond into the physical; imagine a Web connected to everything not only your cell phone but your car, microwave and clothes, thus truly making for an integrated experience. Where Web 3.0 is about control of information web 2.0 is about information overload. The most obvious example is in the sheer explosion of programs and passwords on the Web which claim to encourage networking and socialization. Web 3.0 attempts to bring order and allow users to be more accurate in searching and finding precisely what they want. Allan Cho(2008) Meanwhile, the current trend in the application space is moving away from tightly coupled monolithic systems and towards systems of loosely coupled, dynamically bound components. Systems built with these principles are more likely to dominate the next generation of e-business systems, with flexibility being the overriding characteristic of their success. We believe that applications will be based on compositions of services discovered and marshaled dynamically at runtime (just-in-time integration of services). Service (application) integration becomes the innovation of the next generation of e-business, as businesses move more of their existing IT applications to the Web, taking advantage of e-portals and e-marketplaces and leveraging new technologies, such as XML. The concept of Web Services, described here, is the view of what the next generation of e-business architectures for the Web will look like. The Web Services architecture describes principles for creating dynamic, loosely coupled systems based on services, but no single implementation. There are many ways to instantiate a Web Service by choosing various implementation techniques for the roles, operations, and so on described by the Web Services architecture. IBM Web Services Architecture team (2000) The architecture of Web Services supports the demands of the new semantic web. Web Services view the web as a database, provide communication with mobile devices and just in time integration of services. Web Services are thought of to be a means to provide easily accessible services over a network. They should be simply usable regardless of the underlying network structure or configuration, operating system, communication mechanism or implementing language. This supports the future vision of intelligent computing where data access has to be independent of platform and devices. Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services and will effectively expose their information to the world. The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. One of the first web services opened up by Amazon was the E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products. Alex Iskold(2007) Web services also introduce security risk because they were designed to pass through standard perimeter firewalls unexamined thus hiding potentially malicious threats. There are a number of ways that an e-business setup could be attacked. In conducting e-business, every organization should be able to confirm the identity of the party they are dealing with on the other end of the transaction. Secondly to ensure that the access patterns match the level of access granted. Thirdly, to verify that the intended action has actually been taken. To be successful in business scenarios, Web Services have to be suitable for secure communication. Yet the original SOAP specification contains no solutions to solve the security problem. Other techniques as SSL or IPSec provide standard transport security. The problem: a SOAP connection from one endpoint to another can be seen as a logical connection, abstracting from the physical infrastructure beyond. Logically being an end-to-end connection, the physical layer can comprise of diverse intermediaries forwarding SOAP messages. So during this process of receiving and forwarding messages, security information defined on transport level, the way i.e. SSL works, can easily get lost. Thus any recipient had to rely on the security handling of his physical connection point predecessor, as well as its handling of the data integrity and confidentiality. A way out is to specify security information on message level. Some big players as Microsoft and IBM built a group that dealt with the security problem, finally offering several specifications. The most important, and foundation of the others, is Web Service-Security (WS-Security or WSS). While there are different possibilities to communicate with a Web Services, SOAP is regarded to be the de-facto standard. SOAP messages are being sent to service endpoints identified by URIs, commonly with the endpoint's service processing some action and sending a SOAP response containing results or error codes. This can simply be SOAP over HTTP or even a SOAP message packed in an e-mail, transferred by SMTP. WS-Security defines SOAP extensions to implement client authentication, message integrity and message confidentiality on the message level. Thereby it's not the goal of WS-Security to invent new techniques, but to show how to use existing security solutions with SOAP and Web Service communication. It specifies rules for authentication, signatures and encryption mechanisms. One benefit: WS-Security works in conjunction with other Web Service extensions. Authentication solves questions as "Who is the caller" and "How does he prove his identity". If these questions can be answered, it's the recipient's task to clarify the caller is to be trusted. Authentication specifically prevents: Masquerade attacks: Users must prove their identity, so it is more difficult to masquerade as another. Replay attacks: When using timestamps, it is difficult to reuse stolen authentication information. Identity interception: When exchanges are additionally encrypted, intercepted identities are useless. Note that authentication is only half the part of the security task. Once you know who the user is, you have to determine which resources the user is allowed to access. That's what authorization is for. Message integrity ensures the recipient that the data he receives has not been altered during transit. WS-Security tries to ensure integrity using the XML Signature specification, which defines a methodology for cryptographically signing XML. The signatures are defined using a element and accompanying sub-elements as part of a security header. The signature itself is computed based on the SOAP message content and a security token. The message receiver can check the validity of the message using an according decoding algorithm. Message confidentiality is to make the user sure that the data can't be read during transit, by means of message encryption. Here, the XML Encryption specification is the basis to encrypt portions of the SOAP messages. Any portions of SOAP messages, including headers, body blocks, and substructures, may be encrypted. The encryption is realized using either symmetric keys shared by the sender and the receiver of the message or a key carried in the message in an encrypted form. Identity and its proof is the first topic we are interested in. Without question most service providers see the importance to know who is talking to them, and whether to allow the message sender access to their services. And also the other way, the client to be sure of the service provider's authenticity, is of interest. Authentication can be done using security tokens. WS-Security allows us to use any security token we like to use. Explicitly defined are three different options: username/password authentication in case of custom authentication and binary authentication tokens in the form of Kerberos tickets or X.509 certificates. In addition, custom binary security tokens can be applied. The first option is to rely on custom authentication using username and password validation only. WSS defines an element called which provides support of this purpose. Even with that many precautions made, one cannot be sure to have a secure communication. Still a malicious person could stop a whole message from being delivered and use the Username Token to authenticate an own message. One needs to add a digital signature to his message to be secure against such situations, since this ensures the sender's authenticity. Hendrik R (2004) WebServices are here to stay. They define the face of the future web. Web Services aim to establish a strong and important link between IT and business strategy. This is a promising technology and provides cost-effectiveness by eliminating the need for massive rewriting of existing code. The advent of Web Services put the war of standards to an end. This bridges the gap among legacy, dissimilar and sophisticated web applications thus increasing productivity of businesses. Hence, Web Services contribute unique flexibility and opportunities for collaboration to the future era of web. Ananthamurthy , Lakshmi (2004), Introduction to Web Services, viewed 04 November 2008, http://www.developer.com/services/article.php/1485821 Cho, Allan (2008), What is Web 3.0 The Next Generation Web: Search Context for Online Information, viewed 05 November 2008, http://internet.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_web_30 Hendrik R , 2004, Code Project: An introduction to Web Service Security using WSE, viewed 07 November 2008, http://www.codeproject.com/KB/webservices/WS-Security.aspx#Authentication IBM Web Services Architecture team, 2000, Web Services architecture overview, viewed 06 November 2008, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/w-ovr/ Iskold, Alex ,2007, Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services - ReadWriteWeb, viewed 06 November 2008, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_30_when_web_sites_become_web_services.php MacManus, Richard 2007, 10 Future Web Trends - ReadWriteWeb, viewed 06 November 2008, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_future_web_trends.php MSDN Library, 2008, Web Services, viewed 05 November 2008, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms950421.aspx Welcome to Web, 2009, Web 3.0 Connecting More Than Pages, viewed 05 November 2008, http://www.web3event.com/index.php Read More