Where Web Services Are Going
BEA's WebLogic Workshop, formerly known as Cajun, announced in February and currently in beta 2, promises to make Java-based Web services development accessible to many more developers. This Java-based Web services IDE provides visual representation of Web services; a design-time environment for building, testing, and debugging Web services; and a runtime framework providing a performing, scalable, and reliable Web services deployment environment on the WebLogic application server platform. Currently, the WebLogic Workshop beta is only available for Windows 2000. Look for the final release to be available for Windows, Linux, and other platforms in the coming months. The product and the standard on which it's built, Java Web services (JWS) Tags, were detailed in a recent OnJava.com article.
For more perspective on this product and JWS, as well as a comparison of WebLogic Workshop and .NET, O'Reilly Networks' Rael Dornfest and O'Reilly's senior Java editor Mike Loukides talked to BEA VP of engineering Adam Bosworth. Bosworth will deliver a keynote at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference entitled "Finally Living Up to the Vision of Web Services."
Rael Dornfest: What are you trying to do with WebLogic Workshop?
Adam Bosworth: We focused on essentially two things for WebLogic Workshop. Number one, we wanted to build the right architecture for an enterprise integration platform for Web services. We think that this year is the year of integrating within your own company, rather than the year of integrating with business partners.
Mike Loukides: That's what I'm hearing.
Bosworth: As I've said many times before publicly, we think that there are three key ingredients to the architecture for doing that: a coarse-grained messaging model, loose coupling, and asynchronous support. Those points, we believe, are fundamentally required.
Dornfest: OK, those are all well-taken.
Bosworth: At this point, the only point our customers need walking through at all is the loose coupling. Thinking through, "What do you do for a loosely coupled architecture, why is that so important?" It's something they're still working on.
The second thing we tried to do with WebLogic Workshop was to make it easy enough that the average developer did not focus on plumbing at all. They did not really think about SOAP. They don't really think about XML parsing. They don't think about any of the JAX interfaces. They don't think about maintaining correlations and managing their own state from point to point in a conversational Web service. What they think about is the application and business logic that they need to write, period.
In almost every technology there are really four phases of adoption. Phase one was some technology suddenly came to exist. It didn't do any good yet. Chips existed long before a PC. The ARPAnet existed long before the Internet.
Phase two is some disruptive innovation comes along and makes it possible to do something you just couldn't do before. In the case of the Internet, that's pretty self-evident. Phase three is that a platform comes along and makes it possible for you to do that without having to write all your sort of own super low-level, right-down-to-the-wire technology to do it. Someone who wrote a GUI app in 1984 before Windows, that was pre-platform.
And then phase four -- and interestingly, Web services moved extraordinarily quickly to phase four, in my opinion -- is that tools come out that basically don't make you think about the plumbing. The framework comes out and hides the plumbing and lets you just focus on your business logic. And I think we're at phase four already. I mean .NET is clearly making an attempt at doing that, and so are we. The big difference between us and .NET is that we built in support from the ground up for the asynchrony and for the loose coupling. These are very fundamental parts of WebLogic Workshop.
One other difference, I don't know if it's big or small, but we find that people really like it. We built a digital tool to go along with the source to show you exactly what the Web service is going to do, and you can edit and modify the Web service in either place -- individually or in source. The rest of what we did is pretty standard for what you do any time you go set up a phase four of any platform. You build an automatic test harness, you build debugging, you build a framework to make it really easy. So that's what WebLogic Workshop is. It's basically BEA getting very, very serious about making it possible for anyone with an app server to both consume Web services very easily and to extrude them --where the Web services are not just limited to simply synchronous SOAP/RPC services, but are very general, very conversational, fully asynchronous, loosly coupled Web services. Which is what we think people are going to need for the vast majority of what they're doing on integration.
