Web Services Patterns

THE HETEROGENEOUS NATURE of software and computing platforms leads to a chaotic and fragile web of code in order to make applications appear seamless to the user while sharing data beneath the surface. Further, the salary that programmers demand to rein in the chaos can tax any company and technology department. Even after an application integration job is complete, the resulting system is often unintelligible and difficult to maintain. Web Services create a common architecture and implementation for exp- ing the application functionality that helps programmers integrate systems and create seamless business processes that span departments, companies, and computing platforms. Web Services are attractive because programmers do not need in-depth knowledge of every computing platform that will participate in a business process. Instead, programmers need to understand Web Services and their own programming environment. As you probably have seen with the object-oriented programming paradigm, the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) computing platform, and even the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) computing platform, offering a language, an archit- ture, and a platform to solve problems is not enough. A platform requires an additional layer of organization, known as a pattern, to help realize its full pot- tial. Patterns help you see how to address specific problems with the tools that are available from a computing platform. Web Services are no different from any other computing platform in that the documentation of solutions can help you use the platform better and more quickly.