Technology Decisions

Piece of cake, you said at the meeting. You now plan your attack. Youve got a gaggle of first-rate J2EE programmersbut those two guys down at the far end of the cube farm with all the hardware hanging from their heads grab your attention. They were first-rate hackers in a previous life and should be able to throw this together in no time. They can write a bot that will go to a well-known site and request quotes for selected firms. The results can be screen scraped then dumped into your Oracle database. Another application will query the data from Oracle and post it to the appropriate Web page. Meanwhile, another servlet is creating the 30-day charts using the Microsoft Office API that creates the chart in Excel then saves it as a GIF for Web use. Finally, another script kicks the whole process off every three minutes.

I Dont Think So

Thats great. Your CFO once again thinks you are a genius. But you know better. Or you should know better. Youve broken about 12 different rules of good software development. You have created a one-off custom system to fulfill a single business requirement. Not only is this whole mess undocumented, it is hard coded and thus will prove almost impossible to maintain (completely impossible when those two Gen-X freaks move on to higher ground). Maybe you should have thought about using a plug-and-play component to achieve your business goals. Maybe you should have thought about standards. Maybe you should have thought about both.

Back to Standards

It has been some time since weve discussed standards in this column. In fact, standards were our only focus for the first couple of years when this column was called Standards Bearer. Way back when before the Web, standards probably werent quite as important as they are today. Homegrown back-office systems manipulating big, fat, flat data files didnt really need to interact with other systems. EDI was readily available if we needed to communicate with another system.

The Web has changed all that. Most of our systems now are connected in some way with remote users and other systems 24/7. This means we need to embrace standards that will facilitate communications and connectivity. Addi-tionally, our systems have become so complex we really need to have true plug-and-play modularity, where desired components essentially can be dropped into a compliant system and function as designed.

The resources required to maintain and feed a complex corporate Web site are tremendous. Every single line of hard code or script must be maintained by someone, sometime. Software development costs are exorbitant. How many of you already are outsourcing development overseas either yourself or through a consulting firm?

Every electronic application we build or deliver should be based upon some standard architecture or software standard, or we will be left with a maze of one-offs that must be forced to work together through some ugly and doomed kluge. Web Service for Remote Portals (WSRP) may be just the kind of standard we should be looking at as we improve the way we build and design our Web sites.

An OASIS in the Desert

WSRP is an OASIS cross-vendor protocol that uses Web services to enable portals and nonportal Web applications to incorporate remote portlets. Huh? I knowif you dont know the jargon, you dont know the standard. One thing I find annoying about standards is every single technical term requires a specific definition for understanding and implementation of that standard. I have a pretty fair working knowledge of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), but I never have been able to read through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Specifications without a four-pack of Red Bull.

That means most of our time here will be spent in defining terminology. Once we understand the terminology, we will understand what WSRP can do for us.

First of all, OASIS is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. OASIS has more than 3,000 participants representing upward of 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries around the world. OASIS was founded in 1993 as SGML Open. As might be expected, it was then a consortium of companies and users whose goal was to further the use and interoperability of SGML. In 1998, it changed its name to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and embraced other enabling technologiesmost particularly, various XML-based Web initiatives. I would rank it right behind the W3C as a major factor in international standards.

Web Services

A broad definition of Web services is modular applications that expose a standards-based interface accessible using current Web technologies (HTTP over TCP/IP). For example, you may offer a claims-submission application that could be utilized over the Internet as long as the user knew where the interface existed and how it could be accessed. Web services are based on certain standards so that any application attempting to access a published service will know how to interact with that service. The primary standards on which Web services are built are XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

So, of these, we have three standards, all used to implement Web services, all vendor independent, and all owned by the W3C. The latter two were created specifically for use in Web services. That combination pretty much says to me these standards generally will be used and accepted by anyone wishing to publish a Web service.

The fourth standard, UDDI (Uniform Description Discovery and Integration), is a little different. UDDI did not become a part of the W3C standards. It is maintained by our friends at OASIS.

Portlets

Whats a portlet? Isnt it one of those rental chemical toilets you see at construction sites? Thats what I thought, but the cognoscenti tell me otherwise. Portlets are Java-based Web components, usually managed by containers that process requests and generate dynamic content. A portlet container runs portlets and provides them with the required runtime environment and manages their life cycles. It also offers persistent storage mechanisms for the portlet preferences and customizations. A portlet container receives requests from the portal to execute requests on the portlets hosted by it. Portals use portlets as pluggable user interface components that provide a presentation layer to information systems. (For more details, see Java World: Introducing the Portlet Specification. www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2003/jw-0801-portlet.html)

Portals

Our conception of what constitutes a portal has changed as the Web becomes more sophisticated. Originally, portal was a marketing term to describe a Web site that is or was intended to be the first place people see when using the Web. Typically, a portal site has a catalog of Web sites, a search engine, or both. A portal site also may offer e-mail and other services to entice people to use that site as their main point of entry (hence portal) to the Web.

Nowadays, a portal often is described as a Web-based application that provides personalization, single sign on, and content aggregation from different sources. It hosts the presentation layer of information systemsif you like to think in terms of multitiered systems. It often provides the ability to control significantly personalization for different users. This customization runs the gamut from different look and feel to different content (think My Yahoo!).

In short, according to the latest terminology, if you build a Web site for career agents and that site is the same for all users, then it isnt a portal. If users can customize their experience, then it makes the grade as a portal. Too picky on the semantics for you? Me too, but thats what all the smart guys are telling me about portals these days.

Producers, Consumers and End Users

This is what Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, said about WSRP: WSRP builds on foundational work from the W3C. WSRP uses WSDL to describe interfaces and requires SOAP bindings for all conformant services. WSRP is an excellent example of how an open, standards-based approach will enable end-user interactive Web services to be deployed in a lower-cost, faster-to-implement, plug-and-play environment.
So, at the end of the day, what do we really have here? Web portals can use pluggable components called portlets to generate custom content. In the past, each vendor created and supplied its own interface to access those components. OASIS wisely is leading the initiative to standardize how Web services plug into portals. Content providers can write portlets that will plug right into any compliant portal-based portals (and that includes IIS). This stuff may be all Java based, but the consumer doesnt need to be running on WebSphere or Apache. The standard applies to J2EE Web servers as well as Microsoft .NET platforms.

Whats a consumer, you ask? Excellent question. There actually are three actors in the WSRP specificationproducers, consumers, and end users. Producers are portlet containers that provide a set of Web-service interfaces that manage use of the portlet. Consumers are systems that communicate with the portlets on behalf of its users. Typically, consumers are portals. End users are clients of the consumer.

Yes?

What do you say? Not really very exciting is it? Most standards never are. They seem to be so bogged down in syntax and definitions it is a miracle anything ever gets accomplished. I have served on standards committees before, and I can tell you it is painful to define these things. I suspect many well-designed and well-intentioned standards never are really successfully implemented.

What is exciting to me is to look at the software vendors that have endorsed WSRP: BEA Systems, Citrix Systems, Factiva, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, SAP, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO, Vignette. That is a very impressive list that includes firms that dont always play well together.

I dont know about you, but our business Web systems are becoming increasingly complex, and I like the idea of plug-and-play components. Maybe WSRP isnt the final solution, but something remarkably like it may be some day. With WSRP, maybe you could have purchased a stock ticker portlet and fulfilled your CFOs request in a day instead of weeks.