Rwal Word Case

REAL WORLD CASE 3: AMAZON AND EBAY: THE NEW FACE OF WEB SERVICES

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What are the purpose and business value of Web services?

The principal purpose of Web service is create the exchange of data between business (for example e-commerce or e-business) in real time via Internet, and this way a business might share with its costumers, suppliers, and other business partners all the necessary information.

As a result, the use of Web serving by any organization, which wants grow up and support a place in the market, is the best tool. This is because the increasing and development of the technology and communication (or by the globalization's growth) the use of the Web to make business is increasing too. Thus, when any organization applies de use of Web service, automatically their business value augment, because now, all the benefits that brings work on line they are going to help to the company in its growth.

Some of those benefits that increase the business value are:

* A better, easy and efficient e-business or e-commerce application.

* Coping with the fast-changing relationships between a company and its business partners.

*To go in the global market.

* Innovate the way of make business.

2. What are the benefits of Web services to Amazon, eBay, and their developer partners?

There are a lot of benefits, some of them are the following:

*It allows an explosive business growth

*A person will easily integrate its software with other pieces of software.

*It is an easily option for commerce, because you can run on all kinds of machines, either within your enterprise or at external sites.

*It allows tighter business relationships between enterprises and more efficient business processes.

*Give users the ability to act on information any time, any place, and from any smart device.

*Customers, sellers and buyers can request and get information in real time.

*All suppliers will use the same language to describe their offerings.

*Web services help these companies to expand their market reach.

*The software model that they are using works with popular developer tool.

Also it is an excellent tool for reducing costs.

3. What are the business challenges of Web services?

Web Services are transforming and simplifying the way the enterprise thinks about integrating applications, information and business processes. They represent a new way to link systems together and automate business processes, eliminating much of the complexity and expense associated with traditional enterprise integration technologies. More importantly, Web services will be a catalyst for Service Oriented Architectures, enabling the real time enterprise by accelerating the flow of information and decisions across the organization.

The Web services to succeed need so many technical challenges that have to be seen, many of which are related to the huge environment in which all of them have to survive. The issues that might be used are the following:

* Discovery. How does a Web service advertise itself for discovery by other services? What happens if the service changes or moves after it has been advertised? WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) are two new standards that address this issue.

* Reliability. Some Web service hosts will be more reliable than others. How can this reliability be measured and communicated? What happens when a Web service host goes off-line temporarily? Do you locate and use an alternative service hosted by a different vendor, or do you wait around for the original one to return? How do you know which other vendors to trust?

* Security. Some Web services will be publicly available and unsecured, but most business-related services will use encrypted communications with authentication. It is likely that HTTP over SSL will provide basic security, but individual services will need a higher level of granularity. How does a Web service authenticate users?

* Transactions. Traditional transaction systems use a two-phase commit approach -- all of the participating resources are gathered and locked until the entire transaction can take place, at which point, the resources are finally released. This approach works fine in a closed environment where transactions are short-lived, but doesn't work well in an open environment where transactions can span hours or even days.

* Scalability. Since it is possible to expose existing component systems like Enterprise Java Beans as Web services, it should be possible to leverage the load-balancing and other scalability mechanisms that already exist.

* Manageability. Since the properties of the system are a function of the properties of its parts, do the managers of each of the various Web services need to coordinate in a particular way?

* Accountability. If you sell a Web service, how do you designate the ownership has changed? Can a Web service be totally consumed on use, or can you reuse the service multiple times as part of your purchase agreement?

* Testing. When a system is comprised of many Web services whose location and qualities are potentially dynamic, testing takes on a whole new dimension.

We have to realize that systems that solve these problems already exist. Two such examples are human society and biological organisms. Both of these examples exhibit the following properties:

* Fault tolerant.

* Massively parallel.

* Distributed.

* Well organized.

* Self-repairing.

* Designed in a layered fashion.

* Designed out of simple components.

By taking the lead from these existing