A few months ago I was working on a Java application for the banking industry. There were a bunch of hosted services that we had to integrate in our software. We had to use web services, since the SOAP protocol was the bank's standard way to access legacy data, throughout CICS transactions. The bank's middleware department, in fact, has a cluster of WebSphere application servers running the integration layer which allows the applications to communicate with the mainframe using SOAP. This layer is a home-grown integration software using a variety of proprietary protocols to exchange data with COBOL transactions; the raw data is then converted to SOAP messages. This common) approach allows the applications to deal with CICS transactions as if they were web services.

A few months ago I was working on a Java application for the banking industry. There were a bunch of hosted services that we had to integrate in our software. We had to use web services, since the SOAP protocol was the bank's standard way to access legacy data, throughout CICS transactions.

While Web services are a gentle evolution of existing technology, they are a revolution in the way business can be represented in software. However, we cannot realize the full potential of Web services, or see their revolutionary nature, unless we start constructing partner-to-partner e-business dialogues that conduct real business transactions. This series of articles demonstrates the creation of a real e-business dialogue by leveraging the industry leading e-business process specifications from RosettaNet, and translating them to Web services using the expressive and flexible BPEL4WS.

Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) may not be mainstream until 2008 the way some research firms see it, but more enterprises are putting them into production and reaping the benefits of code reuse.

Scott Woodgate shows how easy it is to build a business process using Visual Studio .NET and BizTalk Server 2004, expose that business process as a Web service, and then consume the business process inside InfoPath – all within 20 minutes.

This article describes the process of deploying and consuming high-throughput Web services for bioinformatics applications. It provides directions for deploying a BLAST application Web service and consuming a BLAST Web service from BioPerl.

The rise of internetworking was enabled by the use of network-level security technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer, IPsec and firewall filtering to create a secure perimeter around an enterprise network. Today, as companies cut costs and drive revenues by securely sharing applications with internal business units, external partners and customers, the secure perimeter has become permeable This shift to the server-to-server access needed for true application sharing is enabled by new XML Web services technologies.

Six new or updated specifications related to binary content have been released by members of the W3C XML Protocol Working Group and Web Services Description Working Group. Both Working Groups are part of the W3C Web Services Activity.

A new software release from network appliance maker DataPower Technology Inc. will add support for Web services development environments, including IBM Corp.'s WebSphere and the IBM-backed open source Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environments (IDEs), the company said.

Web Services technology promises great benefits, but there are also serious questions about security risks. Download this white paper and examine three basic, yet important questions: - What are the reasons for the frequency of vulnerabilities of today’s Web applications? - How do these vulnerabilities apply to Web-services-based applications? - How can these vulnerabilities be addressed in a Web services deployment?

Web services security vendor Reactivity Inc. of Belmont, Calif., announced today at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, D.C. the availability of its free Reactivity Gatekeeper server-side plug-in.

At meetings of the CIO Council’s XML Working Group and other Extensible Markup Language discussions around Washington, Joseph Chiusano is a familiar figure. He asks probing questions and makes observations about how the government can benefit from XML and accompanying Web services.

The rise of internetworking was enabled by the use of network-level security technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer, IPsec and firewall filtering to create a secure perimeter around an enterprise network. Today, as companies cut costs and drive revenues by securely sharing applications with internal business units, external partners and customers, the secure perimeter has become permeable This shift to the server-to-server access needed for true application sharing is enabled by new XML Web services technologies.

Current bioinformatics workflows require screen-scraping the results of different bioinformatics tools on several Web sites. High-throughput services integrated with Web services allow researchers to access a virtual organization by providing seamless access to vast computational and storage resources. In this article you can learn the details of integrating Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), Web services, and the NC BioGrid.

The Web services architecture includes a rich suite of specifications that provide complementary functions in the areas of security, reliability, and transaction-based messaging. By design, these specifications may be used together to meet varied service requirements.

.NET offers an elegant way to store configuration data for applications the .config file. You can use that mechanism in both Windows and ASP.NET applications.

Microsoft is investing millions in promoting .NET and its advantages. One of the many plugged advantages of the Microsoft .NET initiative is XML Web Services – the ability to remove your business logic from custom DLLs and COM/DCOM components (helping to avoid DLL hell) and hosting your middle tier business logic as Web Services, which can be accessed by all your applications (Web Sites, Distributed Applications, etc.) (see this article for more information on creating and consuming Web Services in .NET). But how do you use some of these new Web Services you have developed in a staggered upgrade of your existing 'Classic' ASP Applications?

This article demonstrates how to use the new Microsoft Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) to build ASP.NET XML Web Services that do UsernameToken authentication and X.509 authentication by digitally signing portions of the SOAP message, as well as how to inspect and verify the WS-Security support that is included with a SOAP message.

This chapter discusses web services and some of the Perl facilities that support them.

Networks are everywhere. The Web is a network of linked resources. The Internet is a network of routers. Markets are networks of economic actors connected by the transactions in which they engage. Underlying this last network of business entities is a trust network that connects companies together through the trust relationships in which they participate. In the emerging web services security infrastructure, the hubs in these trust networks are called assertion authorities or security token services. Just as airport hubs like O'Hare and Heathrow make it easier to get from one node to another, the hubs of a trust network allow companies to trust each other. Without hubs to facilitate the establishment of trust between other nodes in the network, these entities would need to establish and manage trust with each other on an individual basis, which can quickly become impractical.