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| Thought Paper |
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Web Services - Can They Withstand The Test Of Time |
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| Abstract |
As an enterprise grows with distributed branches, business operations and software applications; its need for powerful, flexible and reliable "technology connectivity" becomes imperative. This is vital to integrating, streamlining and managing distributed business efforts to ensure focused growth and market success.
Many organizations are striving to achieve this connectivity. Along with efforts in technology advancements and growth of the Internet, they introduced the concept of distributed computing. This implied that different technology components of a software application were spread across different systems, and connected using network links.
One of the requirements of distributed computing is a set of standards that specify how different
technology components communicate with each another via the network. There are currently three
leading distributed computing standards: Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
introduced by the Object Management Group (OMG), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
by Microsoft, and Remote Method Invocation (RMI) by Sun Microsystems. These technologies
played a vital role in improving technological scalability and performance. However, they were
limited to a particular computer language, and thus were not truly interoperable. To overcome this,
common protocols and remote object invocation mechanisms needed to be introduced, which would
be universally accepted as a standard across all enterprises. This led to the evolution of Web
services.
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