From XML to Web services for businesses

With the advent of client-server technology and the Web, consumers have virtually direct access to information held by producers. Traditional intermediaries can now be replaced by new distribution channels. The growing flow of customer- and consumer-oriented information is gradually changing the nature of relationships between buyers, suppliers, distributors, partners, subcontractors and so on. Companies that take advantage of new technologies, particularly emerging Web services, to supply, process, qualify and publish this information, will be the ones to ultimately benefit from this new balance in the value-added chain. The example of the deposit bank illustrates this transformation. After a long period of reflection on their online presence strategies –, which were sometimes initially perceived as incompatible with maintaining a branch network –, almost all deposit banks now offer their customers access to their accounts via a variety of direct means: telephone, WAP mobile, website, Minitel. Rather than creating new applications for each of these distribution channels, the savvy IT department will have implemented the same – Web application – through one or more Web services responsible for adapting the presentation of information to the distribution channel and user profile (personalization). In this way, end-users have the information they need when they need it, regardless of how they access it. In addition, this same application can also be used for other Web services, this time designed to be integrated into external third-party applications (aggregation), such as, for example, those of insurance companies partnering with the deposit bank in the marketing of certain financial products to individuals. Web services technologies make it possible to automate these adaptations, thereby reducing the cost of automating business-to-business transactions and disseminating the information required by the consumer.

Aggregating and transforming information are tasks that Web services automate completely, whether in application integration scenarios (EAI: Enterprise Application Integration) or in business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce scenarios. To achieve this, Web services architecture is based on two foundations: firstly, the Web protocols (HTTP and, to a lesser extent, SMTP, MIME, TCP/IP) and, secondly, XML, standardized by the W3C in February 2002, which forms the basis on which the various standards and proposed standards collectively known as Web services technologies are built. A Web application is the result of the assembly of Web services, some developed in-house, others supplied by external partners. In Web services architecture, to develop is to assemble, to deploy is to publish.