Students were told that there was far more interest in e-commerce Web services over the more community-oriented Web applications, essentially because there was more to be gained in learning Java in all its forms than focussing on engineering design principals. Furthermore students were encouraged to pay serious attention to Web services standards like XML, WSDL, SOAP, and even .NET.
However, rather then signifying a burial of the technology, industry pundits see the move as reflecting a maturing in the understanding of the core function of consumer facing Web pages. Eighteen months ago, Web client/server architectures, server-side scripting, browser-side scripting, information architecture, interface design, designing for scalability still formed the core requirements of Web design. These days such techniques are fairly innate to Web designers.
What's more, many of the unfulfilled promises of Web applications have come back to haunt those developers who now find themselves increasingly called upon to develop standards based Web services.
James Eagleton, enterprise architect with Sun Microsystems Australia, concedes there was a fair bit of hype surrounding Web applications. Initially, they promised to do away with the need for a manual interface between browser based information gathering, but were largely unsuccessful in this endeavour.
-Most of the backends were never designed to interact with anything other than a terminal operator," says Eagleton. -There was still a manual process between a form being filled out online, and the data being lodged in the company's system."
Whereas Web applications took services from their internal base, and -pushed them out to the people that really needed them", Web services are promising to further facilitate that process, allowing for such applications to interact.
-It is impossible to leap frog along, the development line. Web services aren't revolutionary they are evolutionary, once a company has invested in Web applications, and is comfortable with working in that context they can start doing things around XML," Eagleton says.
Even Web applications and useability guru Philip Greenspun, has replaced his -one day Web course", in favour of a -one day Internet course", which proffers a 'big picture' view of the Web development as seen from all manner of devices. While the original course focussed on design features which improved usability, the latest version is more concerned with issues surrounding interoperability.
Standardising Operations
According to Paul Marriott, Oracle business development manager for 9i, there is an increasing tendency towards packaged or shrink-wrapped Web applications.
-The requirements of Web apps is becoming fairly generic across industries, and as a result organisations are buying packaged apps rather than developing them," Marriott said. -Typically any new application development is Web enabled these days, so the focus has shifted to the level of customisation that can be provided to the end user."
However, Marriott warns that although generic solutions and a maturing of the J2EE standard has shifted the focus of the Web applications developer, interoperability issues are by no means solved.
The question facing CIOs is how to select longer-term development strategies based on the most widely accepted standards.
-The thing that would be keeping me awake at night if I was rolling out a Web-based solution is the development strategy," says Oracle's Marriott, Oracle business development manager for 9i. -Once they have made the decision between J2EE and .Net they need to look at opportunities to integrate with other applications."
Con Zamaris, managing director of Melbourne-based integrator and developer Cybersource, points out that although the technology to provide true Web applications, and Web services has been around for some time, the key to uptake is broadly accepted standards.
-XML is like the comma separated value of the new century," Zamaris said. -You can hook up to these metaservices, query servers, and even integrate different systems based on standard mechanisms," Zamaris said. -As long as we agree on what is going backwards and forwards there isn't a problem."
Despite his enthusiasm for the potential of Web services, Zamaris warns against blindly embracing the terminology early on in the hype cycle.
-Most customers still come to us for Web applications, and most can be convinced that they should be doing Web services, but what they want is a browser based application, what it is called is secondary to what it does," Zamaris says. -Web services are business focussed, we will start to see it really take off when we have large players with multiple levels of partners, use them to interact with players of a similar size and scope."
James Roe-Smith, technical and business analyst with Adelaide-based integrators Camms, agrees with Zamaris, pointing out that the initial phase of Web applications rollouts saw companies balk against loosing functionality.
-At the end of the day people weren't getting the level of access to they expected," Roe-Smith said. -Until we get a decent easy to install standard we will have difficulty providing the desired level of functionality, and Web services are a tool for bridging that gap."
Roe-Smith says that although early roll-outs of Web applications were unable to capture the internal complexity of many legacy systems, they continue to play an important role within Intranets and in terms of Internet facing systems
So as the corporate sector creeps ever closer to levels of integration which promise to drive data entry pools into extinction, it appears Web applications will become the foundation for the brave new rollout of Web services.
